


The Phoenix

by orphan_account



Category: Forever Knight
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Episode: s03e22 Last Knight, Hurt/Comfort, LaCroix being nice, Natalie is awesome, Sick Vachon, Vampires, sick Nick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-07-06 05:47:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 28
Words: 65,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15879783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Having mysteriously and miraculously survived her final encounter with Nick, Natalie Lambert has returned to a life in which vampires no longer play any part - until one of them turns up in a local hospital, in desperate need of her help.





	1. Chapter 1

ONE

Natalie didn't know what was waiting for her at the hospital, or why she had agreed to go, because it could not be something she wanted anything to do with.

Too many memories there. The night Nick had taken a bullet in his head, how she'd rushed to his side with fresh human blood and a thousand excuses for why he was suddenly going to wake up even though half his brain had been blown away.

LaCroix had helped her out of that one, hadn't he? The old demon had always been there when you needed him, and even when you didn't. Most often when you didn't.

More bad memories... or maybe it was the non-memories that haunted her more, now. The non-memory of how she'd ended up at that very same hospital, as close to death from hypovolemic shock as it was possible to come. The non-memory of the week she'd spent in a coma as one organ system after another began the process of shutting down, but by the grace of God <yes, she still did believe in God>, slowly began to function again.

It had taken her weeks to recover from the physical trauma of what the doctors so cluelessly referred to as "the assault." That's what they thought had happened. Someone had attacked her and her friend the cop in his apartment. Most of them thought it was the cop himself who had done it. He'd disappeared without a trace, after all.

Natalie had never told them they were right. She had sworn with what she had thought at the time was her dying breath that Nick was innocent. Nick hadn't tried to kill her.

That was at least true on one level. He hadn't _tried_ \- not consciously, anyway. And even when she had known that she was dying, that her blood vessels were collapsing as their precious fluid was drained from them, and felt her heart slow, then flutter, then halt altogether, she had not wanted him to stop draining her life, taking her being into himself.

He'd told her once that everything she thought and felt was in her blood. Had he felt that she wanted him to keep making a vampire's love to her until he could no longer? Until there was nothing left for him to take, nothing left for her to give? Was that why he had done it? Was that why he had not been able to stop even though he had to have known he was killing her?

Or had he simply forgotten it was her, and been unable to stop like always? Had she meant so little to him that, in the end, she had just become helpless prey to a vicious predator, and stopped being Natalie to Nick Knight?

<No! Nick would never think of her in that way...> She had to convince herself of that. If she didn't, the pain would be more than she could bear.

By the time she was able to ask these questions, there was no longer anyone left to ask them of. Nick was gone. The entire Toronto police force had been unable to find a trace of him, and it was not because they hadn't looked.

They'd never find him, she knew. And he wouldn't be back.

She thought she'd learned to live with that until the call had come from Dr. Turner. The very same Dr. Turner who had pronounced Nick dead the night he'd been shot. The same Dr. Turner who treated her, the night of "the assault," and for some reason had not questioned that there was not a drop of blood _on_ her, even though there was scarcely a drop of blood _in_ her.

Nick had managed to be neat, if nothing else.

That night was rife with non-memories, for both her and Dr. Turner. The confused doctor would later apologize, looking uncertain and bewildered when Natalie had questioned her about it. How had she gotten to the hospital? Had anyone come with her? Who had identified her? When had the police realized Nick was missing? Dr. Turner didn't remember, and hadn't written any of it down. Usually, she was not that careless...

Dr. Turner had sounded hesitant when she'd called her.

One of "her" patients was there. Could she come down? That same puzzled voice, only this time not the result of a post-hypnotic haze.

Dr. Turner was puzzled because she knew Natalie had no patients. She knew what kind of a doctor Natalie Lambert was. Doctor to the dead. Formerly doctor to the Un-dead, but Turner didn't know about that. Only They knew about that, and They were all gone now.

Turner had described the patient to her. Nothing she said described Nick. Too young, not tall enough, dark hair and eyes.

So why was she daring, even as she pulled her car into the parking lot, to hope it was him? She had convinced herself she never wanted to see him again. She was done with vampires. She was over Nicholas deBrabant, bogus cop, real enough Creature of the Night.

But what if...

Dr. Turner met her in the waiting room.

"I'm sorry to call you out at this hour, but he did say his doctor's name was Natalie Lambert, and you are the only Dr. Natalie Lambert there is."

"Who is he?"

"No ID. He won't tell us his name. He gave us names of a couple of other people to call, but you were the only one we could make contact with. We can't get much out of him."

Natalie's curiosity was piqued, and that surprised her. She thought it had withered and died when she had lost Nick. Nothing much interested her anymore. Not her job, not what had become her excuse for a life, certainly not finding cures for sick vampires - or ways to change healthy ones into mortals. Still, They were the only ones who had ever called her doctor and meant it in the physician sense.

\+ + + + + + +

Natalie smelled him before she saw him. He was covered with dirt, and the dank, damp smell of it was everywhere. This was real dirt, not the kind that accumulated from not bathing, although it was certain that whoever he was, he badly needed a bath. He wasn't on the gurney. He'd retreated to a dark corner of the examination room where he was violently refusing attempts by a nurse and an orderly to touch him.

Natalie moved in for a closer look. Scraggly dark hair, muddy leather jacket. She couldn't see his face clearly through the dirt, but she thought...

No, that wasn't possible. He was one of the dead ones. Nick had told her that himself. Tracy Vetter had put a stake in him, days before she herself had died.

But it was him. How that was possible, she didn't know, but she was sure of it.

She said his name softly, and then understood why he was in the corner.

"Can you turn off some of these lights?" she said.

The orderly fumbled to find the switches, and turned off everything but the fluorescent fixture over the supply table.

"Is that better?" Natalie asked Vachon.

He nodded.

"Be careful, Dr. Lambert," Dr. Turner said. "He might be dangerous."

Natalie wanted to laugh. <If only you knew...>

She put out her hand and he took it. It felt like the dried mudpies she'd made as a little girl. He was filthy.

"Have you run any tests?" she asked, and tried to make it sound like a professional question, although she had a million lies waiting to explain why the results would be abnormal if they had. Lies she had created for Nick, just in case, but now would never need to use.

"We tried to draw blood, but he won't let anyone near him. He'll probably need to be sedated..."

"I don't think that will be necessary," Natalie said.

She led Vachon to the gurney and he collapsed on it like a pile of rags. He seemed extremely weak, which Natalie knew meant he was probably also dangerously hungry.

Another memory stabbed at her. She didn't stash an emergency supply of blood in her fridge anymore.

"How did he get here?"

"A patrol unit found him lying on the sidewalk. He appeared disoriented, but they didn't think he'd been drinking."

That was something to think about. There was no way Vachon would have come along willingly, to this place where he would be tested and poked and questioned. He must have been too weak or too confused to get away, or to put up any kind of a fight.

She asked for a pen-light so she could pretend to examine him in the darkened room. She avoided shining it directly into his eyes. Even in the dim light, she could see they were flecked with gold. Hunger or fear or both.

Her mind began to run down a checklist of conditions that could cause his symptoms...

Autism seemed a bit too exotic.

Schizophrenia - they might hold him for psychiatric observation.

She needed something she could treat quickly and easily so she could get him out of there...

Then in the next instant, she found herself wondering why she should care. What did it matter to her, really, if they found out what Vachon was? Assuming they could even figure it out?

But it did matter. It mattered to Vachon. And she had to face it -it mattered to her because he could be Nick, at some other hospital in some other place, needing help and maybe not getting it.

"Is he diabetic?" Dr. Turner asked.

Of course! Bless the woman!

Natalie nodded, she hoped not too eagerly. "Good call, doctor. There's no sign of injury. I'd say he's probably in insulin shock."

"Do you want to order an IV?"

"No," Natalie said, as if this were routine to her. "Let's try some orange juice first, since he's conscious."

Vachon clearly didn't like that idea. Natalie put her hand on his shoulder to calm him.

Luckily, the E/R was busy, and both the nurse and Dr. Turner were called away before the orderly returned with the juice, leaving Natalie alone with the vampire.

Vachon's voice was raspy when he spoke. "I can't drink that," he told her. "It hurts too much."

Natalie didn't understand him. "What hurts?"

"If it's not blood."

Pain? Was he trying to tell her real food caused them pain? Nick had never said anything about that. All the stuff she had forced him to eat, and he'd never told her once that it hurt him. Maybe it didn't. Maybe Vachon was just different in that regard.

"You won't have to drink it," she promised him

He gave her a faintly hopeful look. "I'm hungry."

She stroked his hair. How different it felt from Nick's. Thicker, coarser, certainly less well-kept than Nick's had been, but their hair, at least, felt human. "I know," she told him. "But you can't stay here, Vachon. It's not safe, for you or for them. I'll get blood for you as soon as I can."

He closed his eyes as if it was just too much of an effort to keep them open. For him to be this listless, it would have had to have been days since he'd last fed. How was he controlling himself? Why hadn't he just drained the first humans who had crossed his path, Natalie wondered?

It entered her mind that she could be in lethal danger. This vampire could grab her and suck her dry before she could blink.

<Been there, done that> she thought. So what the hell if he did?

\+ + + + + + +

The orderly brought the juice, but just as Natalie had counted on, he didn't stay to make sure Vachon actually drank it. Natalie gulped down most of it herself as she wrote up a phony chart, signed her name to it as attending physician, and then released him.

She found a wheelchair and made him get into it. She didn't know if she could hold him if he collapsed in the middle of the hallway, and she didn't want any excuses for Dr. Turner to keep him there. She folded his hand around the cup of juice, which now only contained a sip or two, just for appearances sake.

"Stay here," she told him. "If anyone comes in, pretend to drink that."

This was an E/R. Blood shouldn't be that hard to come by, Natalie thought, and she was right. A few more lies and faked documents later, she had 4 units of O negative: Nowhere near enough, but she dared not ask for more lest someone take note of the fact that there were no serious trauma cases in the E/R at that moment.

She created a bag out of her coat and casually draped it over her arm with the blood tucked away out of sight.

She wished she had a pair of sunglasses for him. He didn't complain, but she could tell that once they were out in the main corridor that the bright lights hurt his eyes. Nick had adapted to that somehow, but he was an exception, and even Nick had preferred candlelight.

They almost made it to the parking lot exit before the E/R nurse came running after them with the faked chart. Natalie tried not to look as nervous as she was. She really didn't like having to make up lie after lie like she had done so many times for Them. The day she got caught at it would have serious professional implications that could damage her career for good, and what else did she have left now other than her professional reputation?

Her stomach flipped as the nurse approached them, but she remained outwardly calm.

"What is it?" she asked with the impatience of someone who thought themselves vastly superior to whoever they were addressing. Unfortunately, this poor nurse was probably all too used to that.

"He didn't sign it. He needs to sign this and this," she flipped to two different forms. She handed Vachon the clipboard and a pen, and both slipped out of his hands.

She tried again, this time kneeling beside him and holding the clipboard for him.

Vachon struggled with the pen, and couldn't get a proper grip on it. The nurse looked up at Natalie.

"Are you sure he's okay? He still seems a little out of it..."

Natalie feigned annoyance and grabbed the clipboard. She hated being such a bitch. The nurse's concern was sincere, to say nothing of warranted. Vachon _did_ seem out of it.

"I'll take care of it," she snapped. "Where do you want me to leave them?"

The nurse gave her one last suspicious look, but indicated the administrative desk.

As soon as she was on her way, Natalie took the pen out of Vachon's hand. It was easy enough to do. He wasn't actually holding it.

It occurred to her she had no idea what his first name was, and wasn't completely sure about his last name.

"I can write," he said softly when she asked him.

"Well, you fooled me, and I don't have all night to wait for you." Now that _was_ deliberately hostile, and Natalie had no idea why. Partly it was nerves, but maybe it was also the idea that she once again found herself involved with a vampire, when she had thought that nightmare was over.

Verbally cowed into submission, Vachon gave her the information and she signed his name to the forms. What was one more act of forgery?


	2. Chapter 2

As she brought the car around, she wondered exactly where she was going to take him. The Raven was closed down, at least as a haven for vampires. A few months before, she would have taken him to Nick's place, but the last time she'd been there - and she had tortured herself by going back - the alarm code had been changed. Vachon might not want to go back to his church and its memories...

It hit her then. He probably didn't know about his friend Urs. He was dying himself when she had been killed. And he certainly didn't know about Tracy Vetter, who, as it turned out, had only survived him by mere days. He didn't know he was alone now, unless he'd been around town for awhile and had found out somehow.

But Natalie doubted that. She felt the hair on the back of her neck rising when she finally allowed the thought that had been at the back of her mind to push forward into her consciousness.

Like some ghoulish abomination in a horror movie, Vachon had crawled out of his grave, and probably no more than a few hours had passed since he had done so.

A numbing chill wrapped around her, and she seriously considered driving off and leaving him there.

They were predators. They survived. Let Vachon creep away on his own and find someplace to hide from the daylight. Let him find somewhere to hunt and feed in secrecy and get his strength back by himself.

But when she drove up to him, she knew she wouldn't do it. He was Nick again. A different face, a smaller body, but They were all Nick in one way or another.

She threw the car into Park and got out to help him.

"I'm taking you home with me for now," she told him. "You can clean up and get some rest."

No argument.

She handed the blood over to him as soon as the car was moving.

He didn't grab it in a frenzy and gulp it down the way she expected him to <the way Nick would have>. He draped his hand over it to keep it from sliding to the floor, but that was all.

"Are you okay?" she asked him. Dumb question. If he was, he wouldn't be there.

But he nodded, and then turned to stare out the window.

"Thank you, Natalie, for helping me."

Now was as good a time as any, Natalie figured. "What happened, Vachon? I thought you were dead."

A hint of a smile. "So did I."

Natalie didn't want to think he had awakened to find himself buried alive, but that had to have been what had happened to him.

He put a hand on his chest. "She took the stake out. I didn't tell her she was supposed to leave it in."

"How long..." Natalie begin, but didn't quite know how to phrase the question.

"Before I knew I was alive?" He shrugged. "I'm not sure. There was so much pain... I couldn't move, or see or hear... or scream. I thought maybe that was Hell." A tiny laugh. "Then I had to... dig through the earth. I had no strength. I'd dig and then sleep. I don't know how long it took..."

"It's been months, Vachon."

Another little smile. "I guess that's why I smell so bad."

"How long have you been... uh.. back?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. I knew I was out of the ground, but I still couldn't see or hear. That didn't come back until I was at the hospital."

"That must have been very frightening." She said that as small talk, and she should have known better. Despite their supernatural strengths and abilities, vampires still experienced emotion pretty much the same way humans did. The expression on Vachon's face told her the experience had been terrifying for him, and he didn't want to remember it.

She changed the subject. "I thought you said you were hungry?" she nodded at the blood.

He shrugged, shifted uncomfortably in the seat and closed his eyes, wincing as if the movement hurt him. "Maybe in a little while."

She was concerned because she'd never seen a vampire without an appetite for blood, and that included Nick on his best behavior, but frankly, she didn't want him spilling it in her car, either, so she wasn't going to force him to drink it.

She was lucky to find a parking space near the door of her building. There was an elevator inside, but several steps led to the front entrance of the building itself.

Vachon hesitated when he encountered them, long enough that Natalie asked him what the problem was.

He looked down at the steps, and seemed embarrassed. "I can't do this."

"Do what?" Natalie asked, and then realized he meant the steps. Was he really that weak?

At first she took his arm to support him, but ended up literally lifting his feet up the steps, almost carrying him. It wasn't that far, and he wasn't that heavy, but it wasn't something she was used to. She was panting with exertion and sweating by the time they got to the top step. Vachon was shaking from the effort and didn't look like he could go any further.

"It's just a few feet," she said, coaxing him along. He managed the distance to the elevator somehow, and slumped against the wall. Natalie held on to him. If he hit the floor, she'd never be able to lift him. He was almost dead weight standing on his feet.

Finally, miraculously, they made it to her apartment. She opened the door and nudged Vachon through it. He collapsed on the floor in front of the couch.

She didn't even try to get him up. His strength was completely spent.

Sidney ran to her purring, as he always did. He didn't hesitate to jump over the vampire on the floor and ignore him entirely. Cats weren't afraid of vampires for some reason, or at least Sidney wasn't. Natalie had noticed that with Nick.

She unwrapped her coat from around the blood and offered Vachon a bag. He looked like he didn't know what to do with it.

She put her arm under his head and lifted it up, then held the bag to his mouth.

"It's blood. All you have to do is bite it..."

He tried it with his front teeth, which weren't any sharper than an ordinary human's. They wouldn't go through the plastic. His canines were further back in his jaw than Nick's had been, and he wouldn't open his mouth so she could shove the bag in far enough.

Natalie wondered if being buried alive hadn't somehow dropped his IQ by several points. She shook him to get his attention. "Fangs, Vachon, c'mon!"

It was hopeless. He just didn't get it. He was too exhausted or too starved to think straight, maybe both.

She got a pair of scissors, snipped the tubing close to the bag and tried pouring it into him. That only worked until he had more blood in his mouth than he could swallow, and he choked on it. He coughed out a generous spray of it that splattered across the couch and the carpet. But he was too weak too force the rest of it out, and lay there gasping for air while it drained into his lungs. She turned him on his side and gave him a couple of sharp blows between the shoulder blades and he managed a feeble cough that cleared his airway.

Natalie sat back on her heels, careful to pinch the tubing on the bag shut before any more of it ended up on the furniture. "Okay, that didn't work..."

Vachon had swallowed what was in his mouth and looked up at her. "I need more." He had that same look Nick would get when he'd been too long without feeding. "Please."

He wasn't asking politely - he was begging for it.

She hurried into the kitchen and emptied the bag into a small mixing bowl. She returned with the bowl and a spoon, settled herself on the floor and lifted his head into her lap.

She lifted the first spoonful to his lips and he went for it eagerly. He was so hungry, but he didn't seem able to swallow very much at once. She let him take his time, and tried not to think about the fact that she was actually sitting on her living room floor, spoon-feeding blood to a vampire.

\+ + + + + + +

After the first bag, he was able to sit up.

She poured another bag into the bowl and handed it to him, but he had the same problem with spoon that he'd had with the pen.

"What's the matter with your hands?"

He looked at them thoughtfully and then stated the obvious. "They don't work."

She took one in hers and saw that his fingers were stiff and unresponsive. He wasn't able to make a fist when she asked him to, and there was no strength in his grip.

His hands were also so dirty she couldn't see any actual skin.

"I guess I need a shower," he said, when he saw she'd noticed.

Natalie looked at the clock on her VCR. There was less than an hour left before the sun came up.

"Right now you need to eat," she said, and started spooning the second bag into him. "We'll worry about the dirt later."

He looked down at his grubby hands. "I once went two years without a bath."

She thought he was joking and then saw he wasn't.

"That's disgusting."

"It wasn't something people noticed back then, I guess."

"What made you finally decide you needed one?" she teased him.

"Lice."

"Ugh! And they talk about the good old days..."

"Don't think Nick doesn't know all about it."

Natalie's face clouded. "Nick is gone, Vachon."

She hoped he wouldn't ask any questions. She didn't want to tell him the whole story. How Nick had almost killed her - almost literally loved her to death. How she had fought to recover from that trauma only to find that he had disappeared. She had no idea if he had gone into hiding, or had left the city, or if he was dead. There was no one to ask. LaCroix was gone, too.

Vachon sensed her pain, and didn't push. "I'm sorry," he said simply.

"Yeah, me too... C'mon, eat."

He finished most of the second bag and didn't want any more.

"I thought you'd be a lot hungrier," she told him.

He nodded towards the window. "The sun's coming up. It's hard for me to stay awake."

She offered him her bed, even though he was so dirty that she was immensely relieved when he didn't accept the offer.

She helped him out of his leather jacket, which could have stood up by itself since the mud on it had dried. What had been a tee-shirt was now little more than a decomposing rag, so she got that off of him, too. She taped black trash bags over the apartment's few windows as an added precaution before closing the blinds and drawing the drapes shut.

There was a large window in her bedroom, but she left that uncovered. She told herself it was because it wasn't necessary to cover it, so long as she kept the bedroom door closed, but in the back of her mind, she was thinking that even if it made it harder for her to sleep, she'd be safer with a little sunlight in the room.

She hardly knew Vachon, but she was keenly aware that he was not like Nick in one very important respect: He wasn't unhappy as a vampire, which meant he still killed when he could...

By the time she returned to the living room with an extra pillow and a blanket, Vachon was fast asleep. He didn't stir as she tucked the pillow under his head and covered him.

She noticed too late that Sidney had lapped up the few remaining drops of blood and had licked the bowl clean. When he came purring up to her as she worked at the blood spots on the couch and carpet, she pushed him away.

Refusing to be insulted by a mere human, he calmly licked his fur and then spitefully curled up next to Vachon.


	3. Chapter 3

Whatever thoughts she had about being unable to sleep without her drapes closed vanished amidst the other thoughts that kept her awake...

Nick was gone.

That was one thought that always refused to let her rest, and now that she had almost managed to push it from her life, Vachon had brought it back with a vengeance.

She had almost convinced herself, for the sake of her own sanity, that she had never known Nick, or at least, not known him in a way that was different from how everyone else had.

No one spoke to her of him at work, half of them thinking the memory of him would be too painful to her, the other half all but convinced that he had been the one who had attacked her so brutally.

She had claimed that Nick had been attacked, too, but no one believed that. They found no blood at the crime scene other than a very small amount of hers, and even if they had found Nick's blood, it wouldn't have matched his fabricated medical records.

He'd done a lot of backsliding in the last few weeks they were together. The relationship between them had been unraveling for some time, which made the way things ended hurt even worse.

She had the dimmest memory that LaCroix had been there at some point, in the last moments she had spent with Nick, standing over Nick with something in his hands. Anything that had happened beyond that point was still deeply buried in her subconscious. She'd discontinued her post-trauma therapy sessions as soon as those memories had begun to surface.

Her therapist had strongly advised against that, but if LaCroix had killed Nick <Did she remember Nick asking him to, or was that a dream?> she wasn't ready to know that. She probably never would be.

Nick was a cop. They had been friends. He'd disappeared. She was getting over it. There were no more vampires in Natalie Lambert's world anymore, and that was fine with her.

Then, tonight, it had started all over again.

When she was startled awake, it surprised her that she had fallen asleep at all. She'd been thinking of Nick again. Dreaming about him. His cold lips on her neck...

But it wasn't that familiar nightmare that had awakened her.

She fought back panic when she realized she wasn't alone in her apartment, until the events of the few hours before quickly came back to her.

The hospital... Vachon...

Then she knew what had awakened her. He was in the bathroom throwing up.

<Great> she thought, and for a moment considered not dealing with it and going back to sleep. He was a big boy, he could take care of himself.

But he cried out in pain, and it took a lot to make Them hurt, she knew that. She threw off her covers and went to him.

He was doubled up on the floor, his eyes gold, his fangs partially extended. He looked right at her, which should have frightened her, but she saw no threat in his eyes, only agony.

She knelt beside him. "What is it, Vachon? What's the matter?"

He squeezed his eyes shut as if that would stop the pain. "It hurts... like before..."

<When he'd been in such torment that he had begged to die?>

She was close enough to the toilet to see that he'd vomited a large quantity of blood. Just blood. Vampires didn't secrete the many digestive juices that gave vomit its characteristically wretched odor, and for that she was grateful.

She'd examined Nick extensively enough to know that most of Their internal organs didn't function the same way a human's did. She had no idea what the source of pain like this could be.

She pushed his hair back out of his face. "Vachon, I don't know what's wrong. I don't know what to do for you..."

But she couldn't just let him hurt. She found the department issue paramedic kit she had been authorized as an M.D. There was morphine in it. Even it if didn't help, it wouldn't harm him.

He was quiet by the time she got back to him. Ominously so.

He had stretched out on the floor, his entire body strangely rigid.

Even though he was a vampire, and such things were not supposed to happen to Them, it took her only seconds to realize that he was having a seizure.

She quickly turned him on his side in case he threw up again. There were no violent convulsions, so she didn't need to worry about him injuring himself on the hard tile. All she could do was support his head until the tonic contractions stopped.

When they finally abated, he blinked a couple of times but she saw no sign of awareness in his eyes. She pushed his dirty hair out of his face again and found that his forehead was very warm. He was too warm even for a mortal.

She hunted through the medicine cabinet until she found her digital thermometer. She managed to get him to put it in his mouth, ready to pull it out at the first sign that he might try to bite it off.

Nick's basal body temperature had been around 31 degrees centigrade. When the thermometer's alarm sounded, she discovered Vachon's was almost 7 degrees above that. A similar rise in body temperature in a human would prove fatal in minutes.

She knew They could get sick enough to die. She'd seen it happen.

She filled the sink with lukewarm water and used it to sponge him off and try to get the fever down.

As the dirt came off, she saw that there were deep scratches on his face and neck that began to bleed when she wiped the washcloth over them. They couldn't be recent - they were caked with mud. Even if he'd gotten them right before he'd been taken to the hospital, they should have healed and disappeared by then. But they bled like fresh wounds, and continued to bleed for several minutes.

Seeing that, she was careful to avoid the angry red indentation on his chest. The jagged edges of the wound appeared to be healing inward, but the opening itself was covered only by a layer of skin so thin it looked like it would rupture with the slightest pressure.

His heart chose the moment she was examining the wound to contract in one of its six-times-per-hour beats, and she actually saw it pulse directly beneath the fragile skin.

He responded to the cooling water and began to look better in a few minutes. His skin was still not vampire-cold to the touch, but his temperature gradually lowered until he was mortal-cool again. Removing some of the dirt hadn't hurt, either.

He looked up at her, confused, but aware.

"What happened?"

"You had some kind of seizure. Has that happened to you before?"

"No, of course not." He sounded surprised she'd even ask. No matter what, Natalie thought irritably, They still thought they were so damned indestructible.

He struggled to sit up, but then shut his eyes and took a deep breath. "I feel sick again."

He wasn't kidding. He threw up until there couldn't possibly have been anything left in him.

Even so, when it was over, he didn't appear to be in pain any longer.

He literally crawled back into the living room and huddled under his blanket, shivering.

Then he asked Natalie for more blood.

She fed him another bag before he finally went back to sleep, leaving her to worry about where she was going to get more for him when he needed it.

\+ + + + + + +

It was two in the afternoon by this time, and she figured it would be pointless to try to go back to bed even though she was exhausted.

She showered and then sat in front of her bedroom mirror untangling her thick, curly, wet hair.

She'd have to go in to work that night. She'd used up all of her sick leave and then some after the Assault.

Besides, she was still wondering where she was going find a source of blood for Vachon. She'd have to experiment with some possible ways she'd come up with to drain a cadaver...

<You're a ghoul, Natalie Lambert> The thought was full of hostility. <That's all that knowing Them has done for you, turned you into some kind of cartoon mad scientist.>

<More blood. You have to get it for him.>

Damn Them all, anyway! She threw her hairbrush at the wall, and narrowly missed an unsuspecting Sidney, who fled in terror.

She had never been one to cry easily before... before what happened with Nick. But now she sometimes found herself doing it for no apparent reason. Right then, she was doing it because she was... What? Angry? Worried? Frustrated? She didn't know. She just cried.

Vachon didn't wake up, and Sidney stared at her, his green eyes little slits of resentment. Seeing that she'd get no sympathy from either of them eventually calmed her down.

She walked over to pet Sidney, to cuddle him, but he stalked away in a huff and curled up beside Vachon once again.

She knelt beside him and stroked his fur, anyway, until he forgave her and began to purr. She took him in her arms and lay down on the couch. She knew that falling asleep with her head soaking wet would no doubt cause the dreaded Velcro Hair, but she was too weary to care.

She fell asleep dreaming of Nick. His cold kisses, his cold hand in hers.

If she never wanted to see him again, why did it hurt so much that he was gone?

\+ + + + + + +

Her subconscious mind was trying to tell her she should be thinking of waking up when she was jarred out of sleep the same way she had been the first time.

This time, Vachon was screaming with the pain.

Maybe it was a good thing, maybe it was a bad thing, but since the Assault, she didn't fear death. Whether it was because she had come so close, or because she had lived for Nick and now he was gone, she didn't know. But despite her fear that he might hurt her, when she found Vachon on her bathroom floor, she approached him anyway and took him into her arms.

She tried to reassure him by reminding him that the pain had passed the last time, but asked him if he wanted her to give him the morphine, anyway.

"Just make it stop. I can't stand it."

Minutes after she injected the drug, he threw up again. Whether it was the morphine or something that would have happened anyway, Natalie wasn't certain, but she had a bad feeling about it.

Blood was the only thing he could eat, and if he couldn't keep that down, where were they going to go from there?

At least the pain subsided as soon as he'd gotten rid of the blood in his stomach, although he was feverish again.

"You're pretty sick," she told him. "Do you have any idea what's causing this?"

He fingered the angry, oozing scratches on his neck. "She scratched me... that little girl. Only she wasn't a little girl. She was so strong... so evil..."

"Divia?"

"Was that her name? I didn't know... But she hurt me, somehow... It made me hurt like this... before..."

"You could have come to me for help."

He shook his head. "I couldn't think. I was seeing things... awful things. They wouldn't stop. I asked Tracy to end it. That was all I could think of. I just wanted it to be over. I thought I was dying anyway." He sighed. "Maybe I still am."

"No!" she told him sternly. "No, you aren't."

The morphine was making him sleepy and Natalie thought she'd better get him back to the living room before she had to leave him on the cold, hard floor.

"I'm going to need to run some tests, to see if I can find out what's wrong." she told him as she tucked the blanket around him. "I'll need some blood, some tissue samples..." She felt a lump rise in her throat. How many times had she said those same words to Nick?

"Okay," Vachon sighed agreeably.

What she hoped to accomplish she didn't know. She'd already failed miserably with one vampire.

And she had to admit to herself that her motives were not entirely altruistic.

She really didn't want another one of Them in her life, and if she had to find some secret potion to get Vachon back on his feet and out the door, the sooner the better. She'd had enough of the cold-blooded little bastards...

Of course, Vachon would pick that very moment to look up at her with his large, expressive eyes.

Another vampire - this one completely helpless - trusting her to ease his pain.

She smoothed his dirty tangled hair, touching him the same way she had wanted to do so many times with Nick. "You'll be okay," she promised.


	4. Chapter 4

It was amazing how much blood you could drain out of a body bag, if it had a freshly mutilated human in side it. This one was a gunshot wound to the chest. The blood had stopped flowing out of him when his heart had stopped beating, which, from the looks of the hole in him, had been instantly. But it had continued to obey the law of all liquid and drain to the lowest point - where it had flowed out of the gaping wound in John Doe's back and into the body bag.

Natalie emptied a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke appropriated from the fridge in the employee lounge, rinsed it, and filled it with the run- off from her examining table. She even thought to strain it. Couldn't have Vachon's tender tummy accidentally ingesting a piece of raw meat...

<You're as much a monster as he is> she thought.

She put the bottle in the specimen cooler.

Grace was running a tox screen on the samples she'd taken from Vachon. Some skin cells, a lock of hair. There wasn't much blood to work with. He was so dehydrated that even after she'd stuck him a dozen times, she'd ended up actually stabbing him with an Exacto knife just to get a few precious drops. He'd patiently endured the discomfort, as Nick had done.

Maybe for Vachon, it would pay off.

The shift had dragged by. She had been very specific about asking Grace what to look for - she didn't want her happening by accident upon the fact that the blood she was working with came from a source not exactly human. Even so, she worried Grace might find something too weird in the samples, so she hadn't had her perform any tests that would involve her using a microscope.

She also worried someone would discover her tapping blood from a corpse.

And, she had no idea what Vachon was doing while in her apartment. She'd left the phone with him, along with her number, in case he needed anything, but he hadn't called. She had called him and had let it ring a dozen times before she remembered that she'd ordered him not to answer the phone. She couldn't take a chance on anyone finding out he was there. It was not her reputation she was concerned about - God knew that had suffered all it could from the gossip about her and Nick that had circulated after the Assault. But she knew about the Enforcers, and she didn't know if they knew about Vachon.

Still, she wished she'd thought to specify a time for him to call her. For all she knew, he could have spiked another horrifying fever and died. Or, he could have suddenly recovered and was at that very moment roaming the streets of Toronto on a killing rampage, making up for lost time...

She looked at the clock. An hour and 40 minutes to go.

Grace came in looking perplexed. "Where did you get those samples you gave me?" she asked.

Natalie Lambert, Expert Liar, already had an answer for that. "It's just something I'm working on for the museum. Why? Did you find anything unusual?"

"You could say that..." She showed Natalie her preliminary test results. "There are levels of some unknown toxin that are off the scale... This here..." she indicated a specific area on her diagram, "the book says this signature is a component of nerve gas, but the compound yielding that result has more characteristics of an organic origin..."

Natalie appeared only mildly interested. "Maybe some bizarre ritual embalming technique?"

"I doubt it. It's too diffused through the tissues. I'd say more likely it was the cause of death, perhaps the venom of some animal or insect. But, it should have killed instantly. I don't understand how this person lived long enough for it to be metabolized to the extent it was."

Natalie pretended to be too interested in what she was doing to give Grace's report her full attention. "Just leave it on my desk. Let me know when you have the full study completed."

Grace was disappointed. She liked the mysterious, interesting cases, and Natalie had liked them, too, once upon a time. But since the assault - since losing Nick Knight, she had changed. Now, she only went through the motions, got through the day. It was a sad thing to see.

As soon as Grace was gone, Natalie snatched the report off her desk. Of course, these results were only superficial, but they spoke volumes. Vachon's system was saturated with some sort of extremely potent neurotoxin. Except for the fact that it was 20 times more efficient, and had the capacity to regenerate, a vampire's nervous system functioned almost identically to that of a human. Who knew what this was doing to him?

\+ + + + + + +

Sidney came running as usual when she opened the door to her apartment, but she had to search for Vachon. She found him curled up on the bathroom floor again. He looked like he'd been there all night, and somewhere along the way, he'd hurt himself. There was a large, ugly bruise on his forehead and a deep gash under one eye.

She knelt down and turned his face to examine it. "How did you get hurt?"

He shrugged.

She fingered the bruise gently. "There's no way you can not know how you did this," she said sternly. "Did you have another seizure?"

He didn't like that question. "Three or four of them, if you must know."

"What are you doing in here, anyway? Were you sick again?"

"No. The floor is cool. I'm hot."

Funny how those last two little words, "I'm hot," made her heart suddenly ache. She remembered Nick saying them, afraid he was dying, yet mystified that a disease - any disease - would have the audacity to infect his kind. The work she had done with him had saved him from getting as sick as some of the others - some of the ones who had died. He'd never thought to thank her for that, had he? Was that when he had begun to wonder if he really wanted to be mortal? When he had looked death-by-escaped-laboratory-virus in the face, and seen it for what it was? Not just the end of The Vampire, but the end, period? Had he decided that wasn't what he wanted after all, and had he just been too afraid she'd be disappointed in him to tell her the truth?

<Nick is not here. He's not the problem right now. Don't think about him...>

She felt Vachon's forehead. Barely lukewarm, but by vampire standards, he was burning up.

She reached over him and turned on the bathtub faucets, then knelt down and started removing his boots. They felt like they were molded to him, and once she managed to peel them off she threw them in the trash along with his socks. He didn't do anything to stop her until she unbuckled his belt and reached for the button on his jeans.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm getting you out of these filthy clothes, first of all, and then I hope to somehow get the rest of this dirt off of you and get your temperature down in the process."

He pushed her hand away, or tried to. "Uh-uh. No."

She grabbed his wrists and held his hands out of her way. "How about that? I'm stronger than you are. I'll bet that's a new experience for you."

She pulled the zipper down and slid his jeans off. There was no underwear to bother with.

Vachon was embarrassed, but he made no attempt to cover himself, and Natalie got the idea it was because he wanted her to be embarrassed, too.

"You forget, I see naked men every day," she told him.

"Are any of them ever alive?"

That remark stung a bit, as she was sure he meant for it to, but rather than being offended, she was amused at his temerity considering the circumstances.

"Get in the tub," she ordered him.

He looked as though he considered refusing this request, but he didn't.

She had to steady him to keep him from going into the water head- first. If anything, he was even weaker than he had been the night before. She wondered if he could even walk anymore.

"Have you had anything to eat?"

"No."

She was about to ask why when she mentally kicked herself for being so stupid. She'd forgotten he couldn't feed himself.

"I'm sorry about that. I'll get you something when we're done here."

"I don't want to eat. It makes me sick."

"Well, you're going to have to try. I've got some fresh stuff for you."

He looked up at her. Surprise, gratitude, she couldn't tell which.

She removed the band-aid on the inside of his left biceps which covered the wound she'd made with the Exacto knife. The cut was still there, still open, surrounded by a small ring of inflammation. She was glad she'd sterilized the knife as a precaution. He wasn't healing like a vampire anymore.

His hands were dirtier than the rest of him. <The digging> she thought. She rubbed vigorously at them with a soft nail brush and the dirt came off eventually.

His hands were beautiful - flawless skin, long, graceful fingers and nails that looked like glass. Nick's hands had been like that, too, the few times he'd let her hold them. She'd never really had a chance to just look at them and enjoy it. She always had to have some excuse, or he'd pull away, afraid of the contact, the hint of affection.

If any of that bothered Vachon, she saw no indication of it. He shut his eyes and let the cool water soothe his feverish body while Natalie scrubbed and rinsed and scrubbed some more.

As she worked the lather across his bare back, she felt an unexpected pang of resentment. It took her by surprise, because there was no reason for her to resent Vachon. He hadn't done this terrible thing - whatever it was -to himself, and he certainly hadn't asked her to give him a bath. It saddened her when she realized that what bothered her was the fact that she had never done anything even remotely this intimate with Nick...

She had never seen Nick naked, never felt his muscles under his cool, pale, bare skin. She had never even really touched him except with a stethoscope, or through his shirt, or in the most formal of friendly ways.

She noticed Vachon had two small, deep scars on his back, and others elsewhere on his body. Nick had told her vampires didn't get new scars, but kept the ones from their mortal life. Did Nick have scars? He'd been a solder - she was sure he must have had some. Vachon wasn't circumcised, and it was safe to assume that Nick probably hadn't been either, but she honestly didn't have any idea. How would she? It certainly wasn't something she'd ever asked him about.

It was humiliating to think that she had been willing to risk her life to make love to Nick, but that she now knew Vachon's body better than she had his...

His hair was so thick she used half a bottle of shampoo before she was satisfied she'd gotten all of the dirt out of it. By then the water in the tub was black. She drained it out and turned on the shower. Vachon's skin felt cool to the touch once again, the fever gone for now, and she figured he could manage to hold his head under the spray and finish the job of getting the soap out of his hair and rinsing himself off.

She looked inside his jeans for some hint of what size they were and then thought maybe she had a pair of sweatpants that would fit him. She found them and one of her baggy sweatshirts.

She dried him off and dressed him and he hated every minute of it. She didn't blame him. She remembered lying weak and helpless in the hospital while the nurses took care of her most personal needs, and how humiliating that had felt.

The pants were too short. She snipped the elastic at the bottom so they wouldn't be uncomfortable.

She'd have to go shopping for him. Something else she had only fantasized about doing for Nick.

He managed the distance to the living room where he dropped face- down on the couch.

"Is it okay if I sleep here?" He asked as though he thought he'd already asked enough of her.

"Of course it's okay," she told him. "It has to be more comfortable than the floor."

She looked through her cabinets until she found a big insulated mug emblazoned with the name of the gas station that sold them with unlimited coffee or soda refills. It was light and had a handle big enough for Vachon's hand to fit through. She filled it from the Coke bottle and then rummaged through her junk drawer for some straws left over from dozens of fast-food and take-out meals. She hoped he'd be able to hold the mug himself and drink through the straw. She doubted his ego would allow her to feed him again.

She propped some pillows behind him and hooked the mug over his paralyzed fingers. He needed both hands to steady it, but the idea worked once he figured how to use the straws. She left him alone and got herself something to eat while he sipped at it. When she returned with her microwave dinner, he'd almost finished.

"My compliments to the donor," he told her.

"I'll tell him you liked it... Do you want more?"

"I don't think I better."

"Vachon, you have to eat. You've got to be hungry."

"I know I should be," he told her, and looked at the blood that remained. "We usually want it all the time, even when we've just had it."

"The preliminary toxicology report shows you were poisoned. How did Divia do that to you?"

This time when he shrugged, he really didn't know the answer. "She didn't give me anything... I didn't drink from her." He fingered the gashes on his neck, which were still raw and wet-looking. She'd have to bandage them so his clothing didn't stick.

"Well, it's an organic poison, similar to some kind of venom. It's affecting your nervous system."

"Oh."

Natalie was expecting him to say a little more than that. She could see that he wanted to. "Vachon?"

He broke eye contact with her before he spoke. "When I crawled out of the ground, I couldn't see or hear, not anything. Some of it came back, but it's not what it was. I don't think it's even what it was when I was mortal..." He looked at her again. "Will I stay this way?"

She told him the truth. "I don't know. It depends on the nature and extent of the damage, and whether your ability to heal has been compromised as well."

She could tell by the look on his face that she had been too honest with him, too blunt.

"I'm still a vampire, Natalie," he said softly. "I can feel that I am. But if I can't..." He couldn't bring himself to say it.

If he wasn't human, yet no longer had the abilities needed to survive as a vampire, what was that going to make him? Natalie couldn't give him any kind of an answer to that. She couldn't even promise that she'd keep him safe, even though at that moment she wanted to.

She took the empty mug from him. "It's almost sunrise. Try to rest, and we'll worry about the rest of it later, okay?"

But she worried about it then. She fell asleep worrying about it, and when she was awakened by him rejecting the blood once again, she worried about it even more. She wished Nick was there for her. At that point, even LaCroix would do. Any one of Them who could give her some idea of what she could do to help him. Otherwise, he was going to starve right before her eyes.

Not die, just starve. Waste away until he was a thing that had no life yet was not dead.

"I hate this," he said, once the worst was over and he could talk again.

Morphine dulled his pain at least, so she didn't have to listen to him scream. "Nobody likes throwing up."

"I was never this sick when I was human."

"If you'd met up with Divia when you were human, you would have been dead before you could have taken a second breath."

"Well, right now I can't say I'm happy to be alive."

Natalie resisted an urge to blurt out something sarcastic. Something about his friend Urs, who might have recovered just as he had, and then unwittingly wandered off into the sunlight instead of ending up with someone who would help her. Something about Tracy Vetter, whose mortal body never had a chance against the bullets that had ripped through her vital organs. Something about Nick... was he happy to be alive - _if_ he was alive - knowing he had almost killed her? Or maybe thinking that he _had_ killed her?

But she held her tongue. Vachon was miserably sick - the least she could do was let him feel sorry for himself.

He frowned as a unpleasant thought occurred to him. "Do you think she'll be back?"

"Divia?"

He nodded.

Natalie shook her head. "No, Vachon. Nick staked her, and LaCroix burned her. She's dead."

They're all dead, she wanted to tell him. But then wasn't the time for that.


	5. Chapter 5

Unable to sleep, Natalie had gone shopping.

She had stopped at her favorite ask-no-questions medical supply dealer and put blood collection equipment, IV supplies, broad- spectrum antibiotics, saline, and glucose on her credit card. They remembered her from her last research project - Nick.

She then stopped at the mall and bought Vachon some clothes. A pair of jeans, a couple of tee-shirts, socks. All black. Even if he liked other colors, he would still like black. Nick had never been able to explain why, but all of Them liked it. She thought about replacing his boots until she saw how expensive they were. How the hell had he been able to afford them when he didn't have a job? And the leather jacket? Two-fifty at least. Maybe he'd stolen them. Who knew? She found that buying the clothes for him helped her think optimistically. Maybe he'd get well enough to need them.

She got to work 45 minutes early, and it was a lucky thing she did. It gave her first crack at one Mr. Warren Thornton. He'd been found dead in the weight room of a posh local health club, an apparent heart attack, but an autopsy was required to rule out foul play even though none was suspected.

He had just been brought in. His blood hadn't completely clotted in his veins yet...

Natalie tilted the examination table so Mr. Thornton's head was lower than the rest of him. She then used her newly purchased medical supplies to open his jugular vein and carotid artery and began the process of siphoning every available drop of blood out of him. She still had one of the units from the hospital and a liter and a half in the Coke bottle, but from here on out, she was going to have to get it whenever and wherever she could.

<Until Vachon could hunt for himself...>

She was making a big assumption at that point that Vachon wouldn't simply die on her. She had no idea how much longer his body could go without nourishment before the poison in him overwhelmed his system completely. Maybe hours, maybe forever.

She would have liked nothing better than to admit him to a hospital and run every test in the book on him, but there was no way that was going to happen. Grace was suspicious enough without dragging in an entire medical team.

"Natalie, what are you doing?"

Natalie jumped...

<Speak of the devil...> Grace had appeared behind her. She hadn't even heard her come in. Grace could be as bad as Nick in that respect.

"What? Oh, hi, Grace."

"Why are you collecting that man's blood?"

"Well, I uh... have a new theory I want to check out."

Grace gave her a questioning look. "This hasn't got anything to do with all those experiments you were doing on Detective Knight does it?"

Natalie looked stricken.

Grace put an arm around her. "I know, I know. It hurts just to hear his name. But Natalie, you haven't been the same person since he disappeared. I'm worried about you. Now this..." she waved a hand at the corpse. "I don't understand."

If her relationship with Nick had taught her anything, it was how to think fast.

"Grace, you're my friend. Can I trust you?"

"Of course you can."

"It's a relative of Nick's. He's come to me for help. He suffers from the same genetic disorder..."

"Does he know where Nick is?"

Natalie shook her head sadly. "No. And I'm afraid he's very ill. He is much more seriously affected than Nick. Even the special diet isn't working. Everyone else has given up on him. Nick apparently mentioned our work once, and he got here somehow. I'm afraid now I'm his only hope."

Natalie congratulated herself. _None_ of that was a total lie. Not really.

"Those toxicology studies you've had me working on... they're not..."

Natalie nodded. "They're his. So you know how sick he is."

"Sick!? I don't know why he's not dead."

"I don't either. His condition is far more advanced than Nick's was."

"Can I help?"

"Grace, you already have. And I know I should have confided in you before. But you see why I have to be quiet about this. I don't have the authority to be conducting independent biomedical research, particularly not in a public facility. But I can't take a chance on this work being interrupted."

Good. Still no lies.

"Nobody will find out from me... Besides, it's good to see you interested in something again."

That comment took Natalie by surprise, especially when she realized it was true. She had not cared about anything since the Assault. She hadn't even managed to interest herself in looking for Nick. Deep down, she was afraid of what answers such a search might reveal.

Vachon's intrusion on her life had been both unwelcome and unwanted, of that there was no doubt, but worrying about what she was going to do with a disabled vampire under her roof had, she admitted, gotten her mind off of Nick and put it on something other than her own misery.

"You had better let me test a sample of that for HIV before you handle it," Grace nodded at the near-full bags of blood.

Natalie supposed that for her own safety, Grace was right.

Grace was an extremely intelligent woman. It was possible she hadn't bought a single word of Natalie's explanation. Natalie loved the woman for not asking any more questions.

After she left, Natalie opened up the locked drawer at the bottom of her desk. It was filled with notebooks, a journal of the work she had done with Nick. She had the information on computer disks, too, but had found it that if she was unexpectedly interrupted, it was much easier to cover up something on your desk than on a monitor. Besides, Nick could get into her computer, but he couldn't access the drawer without breaking the lock. Some of her more personal observations were pen-and-ink only.

She tried to glance over the notes quickly. They brought back too many memories she still couldn't deal with, and right then, she wanted information, not to be reminded of Nick Knight.

She found what she was looking for. The most thorough - probably the only - complete blood chemistry study ever done on a vampire. Electrolytes, blood sugar, cell counts - everything she needed to know what constituted "normal" vampire blood.

Vampires metabolized the blood they fed on by changing the actual DNA structure until it became their own vampire blood, but their bodies did not replenish it. Although their bone marrow contained blood cells, they were not produced there. As far as she could tell, those sites became the source of those unique vampire antibodies once They were brought across. But, she only had one sample to work with. Nick had very definitely not enjoyed it when she had taken bone marrow from him, and he'd never let her do it again.

Eventually, if a vampire's blood was not replaced by ingestion, it became used up, nothing but a muck of dead cells and potent vampire antibodies that would begin attacking the host if not held in check by a fresh infusion. That was what caused them to experience sudden, severe pain if they went too long without feeding.

It had been months since Vachon had fed as he should have, and there was very little actual blood left in him. His body was nowhere near any of the proper levels of anything.

She examined a slide of his blood and noticed a few strange-looking blood cells, which she dismissed as the result of the decaying process. What was most striking was that it contained only a minute fraction of the antibodies that should have been there. That was good news because it meant they weren't about to turn on him and eat him alive. The bad news was, he probably now had less healing capacity and disease resistance than an ordinary mortal. The poison had devastated his immune system, and without blood to nourish the tissues that produced the antibodies, that would not change.

She found the last note book in which she had entered comments about Nick. She skipped those, too. Things had taken a turn for the worse the last few months they were together. He had gone back to drinking human blood, for one thing. She didn't want to remember any of it.

On the first blank page, she began new entries.

\+ + + + + + +

Natalie noticed something different the minute she walked through the door, but didn't know what it was until she looked at Vachon, still on her couch, with Sidney curled up on top of him.

The tabby hadn't rushed to greet her as he usually did.

"So," she stroked his fur, "now you think you're too special to say 'hi' to me."

Vachon opened his eyes. "Hi."

Natalie laughed. <How long had it been since she had done that?> "I was talking to Sidney. He seems to like you."

"Sometimes animals don't." He placed a hand on the cat. "Dogs, they like anybody. But cats know... about the vampire. Some are afraid. They usually don't like it that we feel cold, either."

She felt his forehead. His skin was anything but cold. She checked under the bandage she'd put on the scratches on his neck. They showed early signs of infection.

She frowned, and he noticed.

"I know. They aren't healing."

"Do they hurt?" Severe pain could mean the infection was spreading below the surface of the skin.

"Some. Not too bad."

He was almost too tall to stretch out on her couch. "I think you'd be more comfortable in a bed. Think you can make it to the bedroom?"

He shook his head. "I can't walk anymore."

She nudged Sidney off of him. "C'mon. I'll help you."

She did most of the work. It would have been much simpler if she had been strong enough to carry him.

Once she had him sitting on the bed, she asked him to perform some simple movements for her. She was certainly no expert at neurological assessment, but it wasn't hard to see why he was having such difficulty. Instead of traveling in a direct path, the signals from his brain to his body seemed to be going wherever they wanted to, which made it almost impossible for him to selectively contract or relax specific muscles. If he tried to flex an arm, the muscles that extended it would fire at the same time. Some muscles were spastic and others completely flaccid. He was generally so weak that he could barely sit up. When she saw the examination was upsetting him, she stopped.

"Are you too hot in this shirt?" she tugged at the heavy sweatshirt. He didn't need to be any warmer than he was.

"I couldn't get it off."

She pulled the shirt over his head. "Someone really should be here with you while I'm at work."

"NO!" he snapped. "Nobody can know."

"Know what?"

"That I'm... like this."

<This has to be hell for him...>

She touched his hair. She loved the feel of it, and wondered how Nick's would have felt if he'd let it get as long as Vachon's. "It's okay. No one will know."

The ugly stake wound still stood out on his chest. At some point in time, it had begun to heal and then stopped. Probably when his supply of antibodies had dropped to an ineffective level. But the scratches were older than the wound. Why had they not healed at all? The only answer she could come up with was that the scratches were the site where Divia's poison was introduced into his body. It was most concentrated at that point, and the antibodies were useless against it.

She didn't tell him any of this. It wasn't something he needed to hear right then.


	6. Chapter 6

Clearly, being poisoned had made him unable to eat, but at what point had that occurred? And she had nagging questions about why he had apparently suffered horrifying hallucinations immediately after the attack which had now subsided. What would happen if his blood were restored?

She guessed she would find out, because she intended to get some blood into him any way she could.

"Vachon, were you able to feed _after_ Divia attacked you? Do you remember?"

"I don't know. I didn't really want to feed..." He looked away, embarrassed. "I just wanted to kill. I was crazy. I attacked Urs. I wanted to kill Tracy. But I don't even remember being hungry."

That hinted that his inability to eat might be part of a vicious cycle. The fact that he had healed in the beginning indicated his blood could counteract the poison, but the poison made him unable to eat and replenish his blood. He rejected everything an hour or so after he drank which led Natalie to suspect that the toxins in his body were affecting him in a way similar to the effect chemotherapy drugs had on cancer patients. It wasn't the food or even his stomach that was the problem, but an abnormal neurological response of some kind.

He didn't like the idea when she produced the equipment and told him that she planned to try giving him blood intravenously.

"It won't hurt." <Not a lot, anyway.>

"Yes, it will. I don't like needles."

"Nobody likes needles, Vachon. Deal with it, or you're going to starve."

She checked his hands, his arms, his feet, looking for a suitable vein -but he was so dehydrated she wasn't able to find one near the surface. That left her with the choice of either cutting down to find an acceptable site, or using the large blood vessels on his neck. The latter was risky in a human, because the blood came gushing out with considerable force once they were penetrated.

But vampires had no blood pressure to speak of, no steady heartbeat, and Vachon had hardly any blood left in him, anyway.

She pushed his head to the side and swabbed his neck with alcohol. Ordinarily, that wouldn't have been necessary. But his immune system was clearly not doing its job the way it was supposed to, and she had no idea how susceptible he was to infection.

"Hold still," she told him. "I only want to have to do this once."

The way in which he languidly stretched his neck so that she had easy access to every inch of it should have told her something, but maybe Vachon wasn't even aware of the implications at the time.

"You ready?"

He nodded yes, and she quickly slipped the needle into his jugular vein. A tiny trickle of blood formed at the site, but was instantly sucked back into the wound. Quickly, she taped it down and started the blood flowing at maximum rate.

Vachon moaned and shut his eyes.

"Are you okay?" she asked him.

Personally, she'd have to seriously consider fainting if someone stuck a needle in her neck.

He nodded. "Yeah, I... uhh..." He took a deep breath and rolled over so he wasn't facing her.

His body tensed, and he buried his face in the pillow and made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a groan.

Natalie was perplexed. He didn't sound like he was in pain, or look as though he were experiencing another seizure.

She spoke his name, but he didn't answer her, and she began to wonder what fluke of vampire an anatomy she had failed to consider this time, when the answer hit her like a slap on the forehead.

She felt the blood rising first into her cheeks then her entire face.

A puncture wound to the neck was the vampire equivalent of copulation.

And she had been with enough men enough to know exactly what was wrong with Vachon - or rather, what wasn't wrong with him.

She had no idea what he was thinking, if in fact he was even capable of thought at that point, but she was so embarrassed she wanted to disappear.

He drained the bag quickly, but not so fast that she didn't have time to compose herself and reassume her professional demeanor. During that time, she couldn't help but wonder if she hadn't just inadvertently expanded the horizons of kinky vampire sex.

Vachon's entire body quivered when she pulled the needle out.

He kept his head in the pillow. Maybe he hadn't realized what would happen any more than she had.

"Are you okay, Vachon?" she asked, in the most matter-of-fact tone she could manage.

"Oh, yeah."

Was he grinning? She was going to smack the little shit if he was!

But when he finally turned and looked at her, there was more color in his face than she had ever seen on a vampire. Maybe it was the fresh infusion of blood, but he really did look like he was blushing.

"I didn't know that would happen," he told her. Even so, there was a grin creeping into his expression, she could see it!

She decided her least humiliating option would be to avoid discussing it altogether, but he had different ideas.

He touched the little puncture wound carefully. "The blood always leaves through here... I never felt it coming into me that way... It was... nice."

Natalie fumbled with the equipment. "Well, I'm glad one of us enjoyed it. How do you feel?"

He gave her a you-should-know look and she definitely wanted to smack him one. If any more blood ran up into her head, her face was going to explode.

"We'll wait a couple of hours and see what happens before I give you anymore." <This time, preferably, via some other location.>

He rolled over on his stomach. It was difficult for him, and looked like it hurt.

"Are you in pain?" Natalie asked him, gently putting her hand on his bare back.

"Everything hurts," he muttered. "It doesn't go away."

She rubbed his back gently, which he seemed to appreciate.

"Natalie?"

"Hm?"

"I want Tracy to know I'm alive. I don't know how to tell her..."

Natalie felt a ball of ice form in the pit of her stomach. She wasn't prepared to tell him the truth. Not yet. But it would be cruel to lie to him.

"We can talk about that later," she said.

He accepted that, and was quiet for a few moments.

"I don't feel Urs anymore," he said softly. "I told her to leave, but I don't think she did. I'd still feel her... Did Divia kill her?"

"I think so," Natalie told him. "She was hurt much worse than you were. I saw her body. I don't think she was able to come back, like you did."

"She was never happy about... what I did to her. Maybe now she knows why I had to."

"Why did you have to?" Natalie had to know the answer to that. Had to hear it from a vampire. Had to know why Nick _didn't_ have to, why he had chosen not to bring her across.  <Did she really believe that's what he'd done?>

But Vachon's reply was disappointingly simple. "She was so beautiful. I couldn't let her die."

"There had to have been others just like her, Vachon. Don't tell me you brought them all across."

"No. Just Urs. Her blood told me things. That all she wanted was to be loved, protected. She didn't think that was possible for her, but she wanted it so much she didn't want to live if she couldn't have it. I thought I could give her that, but it turned out she didn't want it from _me_ , not from a vampire."

That had hurt him. Natalie heard it in his voice. He had loved his Urs, in the only way he was able to - as a vampire. But no matter how great that love had been, it had not been enough, had not been what she had needed or wanted.

"Yeah, I think I know how that feels," she sighed. This conversation was hitting much too close to home. She pulled the sheet up over him. "Rest now. If you're okay in two hours, we'll give you some more fluids, and then some antibiotics."

She remembered the window, and went to get more garbage bags and duct tape. She wondered what on earth her neighbors must be thinking seeing that now every window in the apartment was blacked out. Hell, let 'em wonder. If they asked, she'd tell them she had a houseguest who was a vampire. Like anybody would believe that.

When she returned, she saw that Sidney was licking the drops of blood that had drained from the IV tubing. If he could have stuck his tongue up into the bag, he would have.

"Bad kitty!" she hissed at him.

He hissed back, turned his tail up at her, and folded himself up on Vachon's back.

\+ + + + + + +

It was fortunate she didn't have to go in to work that night. She had taken her alarm clock into the living room and set it to wake her up every three hours during the day, but she'd hardly slept in between, waiting for Vachon to exhibit some violent reaction to whatever she had last pumped into him. Luckily, that didn't happen, not with the saline or the glucose or even the antibiotics. She'd also given him another liter of whole blood.

Now, after just 12 hours, the improvement was noticeable. His temperature had dropped to just one or two degrees above vampire- normal almost immediately and had stayed there. The inflammation had begun to disappear from the scratches, the incision she'd made in his arm, and the cut under his eye. They still weren't healing like they should have been, but it was a start.

Despite her embarrassment, she'd been forced to use his neck repeatedly, and had discovered, much to her relief, that it was only the blood that aroused him, although she knew he actually got an erotic thrill out of having that needle stuck in him. Well, might as well let him enjoy something, she figured.

After the fifth transfusion, other blood vessels became detectable, but she decided to stop for awhile. She'd given him almost two gallons during the course of the day, and she didn't know how much he could handle. She had never established with Nick how or if They got rid of excess fluid in their bodies. Their kidneys didn't appear to function, but that didn't mean they couldn't. Other organs performed when there was something for them to do; secreting hormones, metabolizing drugs or alcohol, manufacturing new cells. But for all she knew, she could accidentally drown Vachon by giving him too many fluids at once. It probably wouldn't kill him, but pulmonary edema in a vampire was something she had never dealt with, either, and she was too tired to want to have to think about it.

Vachon hadn't slept any better during the day than she had, and they were both exhausted. She made sure he was comfortable, then fixed herself a microwave macaroni and cheese dinner and plopped herself down at the kitchen table to eat it. She took out her notebook and had every intention of updating her findings while she ate...

She awoke with her head on the table, strands of her hair in the half-eaten macaroni and the ink from her felt-tip pen leaving a spreading stain on her lavender sweatshirt.

Her heart was pounding. Something had startled her awake. Again.

<What now?>

She sighed and deposited the cold macaroni in the garbage can. She thought she heard Sidney meowing for food and expected him to come curling around her ankles. But when she realized that it wasn't Sidney making the strange noise, a cold chill traveled down the length of her back.

She was hearing it plainly. A strange sound, but not an unfamiliar one. She'd made it herself a few times thanks to her Nana's temper. It was the stifled cry of a child too intimidated or terrified to wail out loud. "What the hell..."

It was coming from the bedroom, but it seemed unlikely that Vachon - an adult and a vampire - would make a sound like that. Her stomach sank as the worst possible scenario crossed her mind. He'd found a victim. One small enough and weak enough for him to overcome...

\+ + + + + + +

She didn't see him at first when she entered the darkened room. She found him huddled in the narrow space between her bed and the wall.

"Vachon?"

He didn't look up at her. The sound was indeed coming from him. He was crying, and saying something in a soft voice that she couldn't understand and first, but then recognized as Spanish.

"Vachon, I don't understand what you're saying. What is it? What's wrong?"

She took a step towards him and he let out a horrifying scream, nothing childlike about it. Just when she was certain her entire building was going to think someone was being tortured to death in her apartment, he became abruptly silent, as if he were suddenly gasping for air.

He began to thrash about violently, with no regard for he fact that he was slamming his head and face repeatedly into the wall and the headboard of the bed. She was certain he was having another seizure - far more violent than the others. If she didn't restrain him, he was going to hurt himself.

She heaved the bed away from the wall so she could get to him, and she managed to get her arms around his upper body. Luckily, he was still very weak, but restricting his movement was about as easy as maintaining a grip on a toddler who didn't want to be held. He seemed to be trying frantically to get away from her - or from something, and she quickly surmised that this wasn't a seizure.

He was seeing or experiencing something that wasn't happening. For whatever reason, he was hallucinating again.

"Vachon!" she yelled as loud as she could. "Stop it! You're all right. You're safe..."

She hated to leave him, but when she saw she wasn't getting through to him, and was in very really danger of being injured herself, she ran quickly to her medical bag and rummaged through it until she found the curare that was in there. It was certainly not something ordinarily issued to paramedics, but Nick had told her once that it would sedate a vampire and she had obtained some just in case <Had she ever really trusted Nick completely?>. She filled a syringe with it. Not too much... curare caused paralysis, and Vachon was barely able to move as it was.

By the time she got back to him, he had battered himself bloody. She grabbed one of his flailing arms and quickly plunged the syringe into his forearm.

He let out another ear-splitting screech and twisted out of her grasp, bending the needle at a 90-degree angle. She wasn't sure if any of the drug had actually gotten into him.

She didn't get out of the way fast enough when his right foot came up from the floor unexpectedly. Whether it was a reflex or deliberate, he connected with the left side of her jaw. The blow rattled her teeth and made them feel as if they were being driven up into her eye sockets. In the split second of consciousness that remained after that, she wondered how he could kick so hard when he couldn't even walk.

Adrenaline rush...

That was her last thought before the blow sent the right side of her head crashing into the edge of the headboard...

\+ + + + + + +

His face hurt. And something was stabbing his arm...

He looked and saw the syringe hanging from it. He used his thumb to flick it out of his flesh. He knew why it was there, and who had put it there. No anger. She had made the visions stop for now.

"Natalie?"

Luckily, he was lying face-down on the floor. He was in a cramped space with no room to turn over, and he'd discovered earlier that on his back, he was almost completely helpless, but this way, he could use his arms and legs to push himself up.

When he did, he saw Natalie sprawled across the bed with her head hanging over the side. She was ominously still.

He struggled to her side, and pushed her head up onto the mattress.

"Natalie? Are you okay?"

It was immediately obvious that she was not. But he sensed that her heart was still beating. She was alive, but she was hurt.

He had hurt her.

Walking was almost impossible, but he somehow got to his feet anyway and made his way into the bathroom.

He ignored the blood that he could feel trickling down his own face.

He soaked a washcloth, but got too much water on it and couldn't wring it out because his hands were practically useless.

He dragged himself back into the bedroom with it and collapsed next to the bed. He draped the dripping cloth over Natalie's forehead, hoping the cool wetness would bring her around.

"Natalie, I'm sorry..."

When he turned her head to the side, he saw the ugly, purple welt rising along the right side of her face. A large, swollen bruise had already formed on her jaw.

He wasn't sure how hard he'd hit her. His memory of doing it was distant and hazy. But he knew a mortal could die from a blow to the head, and she had been unconscious for several minutes by this time.

He tried again to rouse her. "Natalie, please wake up!"

It was useless, he could see that.

And now an odd numbness was beginning to creep through his body. Whatever she had given him had abruptly ended his hallucinations, but now it was doing something else to him.

He was sleepy. He knew he shouldn't sleep, that he should help Natalie, but he couldn't fight it.

There was a phone next to the bed.

His eyes refused to focus, and his fingers refused to cooperate, so it seemed like minutes passed before he managed to lift the receiver and dial 911...

\+ + + + + + +

Natalie's head felt like nails were being driven into it. Big nails. Huge nails. Railroad spikes.

She had been conscious for some time, but didn't dare open her eyes. The mere thought of any light penetrating her skull made her even more nauseous than she was.

Someone was saying her name. She mumbled in response, her jaw too sore to attempt anything intelligible.

"It's Dr. Turner, Natalie. Would you care to tell me what happened?"

<Lie. Think of a lie...>

"I hit my head."

A gentle, feminine hand on her shoulder.

"Natalie, this is the second time you've shown up in my ER with unexplained injuries. I've already reported it to the police, so you might as well tell me what really happened. Who did this to you? And why are you protecting him?"

If it wouldn't have hurt to do so, Natalie would have laughed at that question. She wondered what Turner would do with an honest answer <Well, I keep getting involved with these vampires who don't mean to hurt me, but they do. As for why I protect them, there are these big mean vampires who will hurt me even worse if I don't...>.

She tried to sit up, but her head spun with unmerciful persistence.

"It was an accident," she muttered. "A patient. He kicked me while he was having a seizure... You remember him, he was here the other night."

She opened one eye just far enough to see if Turner was buying any of this.

"Who made the 911 call?"

"911 call? I... uh... it wasn't me. I don't know."

Had it been Vachon? Or had someone been concerned about all the racket and checked on her? And in either case, where was Vachon now?

It hurt to even think.

"I take it you won't be pressing charges this time, either." Turner's voice had gone from sympathetic to stern. Natalie couldn't blame her. How many battered women had she seen go back for more?

"No, of course not. It really was an accident."

Turner sighed wearily. "Well, he accidentally gave you a concussion and a hairline fracture of your jaw. You're going to have some loose teeth, but if you're lucky you won't lose any. Maybe next time you won't be. Next time, he might kill you."

"I wasn't beaten," Natalie insisted.

A discomforting thought occurred to her. "They didn't arrest him, did they?"

Turner's lips curled in annoyance. "No, they didn't... I'm admitting you for observation. If you change your mind about this scumbag in the meantime, let me know." She tossed Natalie's chart in the rack and walked out, disgusted.

Natalie wondered if Vachon was still in her apartment, sick and alone and now probably scared to death. If he'd left, he couldn't have gotten far.

She made a sincere effort to work up enough concern for him to be able to get up and go home, but it was no use. Her head pounded like a bass drum and just thinking of standing up made her stomach churn. Vachon was on his own for now.


	7. Chapter 7

After 24 hours of so-called bedrest, during which she wasn't allowed to sleep for more than an hour at a time without being awakened to make certain she wasn't comatose, Dr. Turner showed up to release her.

She handed her a card with the name of a counselor who specialized in treating victims of domestic violence and the phone number of an emergency shelter.

Natalie thought about protesting one more time that she was in need of neither, but instead thanked Dr. Turner. It was good to know that if she had been in that situation, there were people like Turner who would care.

She was about to phone for a cab to take her home when Grace walked in on her.

"Grace... How did you..."

"Know you were here? The whole department knew 5 minutes after 911 call came in. What happened Natalie? Is Nick back? Did he do this?"

Natalie sighed. "Please, Grace. I've explained that a half dozen times, and no one believes me. I'm too tired to go through it again. Just take me home."

Thankfully, Grace didn't argue with her.

The nausea had finally abated, and she was starved, so she had Grace stop at a fast-food place on the way home. The dull, constant ache in her jaw gave her every reason to believe it was going to be an experience trying to eat solid food, but they ordered fries, burgers and everything else in the basic junk-food groups, anyway. Natalie got a chocolate milk shake, too. <When all else failed, there was always chocolate...>

She was mentally scanning her list of concocted lies to explain to Grace why Vachon was in her apartment, but when she opened the door, she saw no sign of him. She checked the bedroom and bathroom, too, but didn't see him anywhere.

The clothes she'd bought for him were still there, still in the bag from the mall. She'd thrown almost everything else he'd been wearing out and none of her stuff appeared to be missing. She wondered how far he'd get before someone noticed he was half naked, but something told her he hadn't gone far. Even so, she couldn't look for him while Grace was still there.

She settled onto the couch while Grace fed Sidney and brought plates for the food.

Her jaw was so sore she couldn't open it far enough to get the hamburger in. Grace got a knife and cut it into tiny bite-sized pieces for her, which helped, but chewing was still painful. She found herself cursing Vachon with each mouthful.

Grace made no more attempt to find out what had happened, for which she was grateful.

"Do you want me to spend the night? I can go home and get a few things and be right back," she offered.

"No, Grace. Thanks, but I'll be okay, really."

"Well, at least let me clean up the dishes..."

She carried the plates and silverware into the kitchen and was rinsing them in the sink when something caught her attention.

"Natalie?"

"What?"

"There's blood all over the floor in here..."

How to answer that? <It isn't mine...> <Well then who's is it, where did it come from...>

Grace was bending over a spot on the linoleum. "It looks fresh..."

Natalie found the strength to get to her feet in an instant. She saw what Grace was looking at. Sidney had found it, too, and the evidence was quickly disappearing onto his eager tongue - a rivulet of blood that went from the refrigerator to the laundry room.

This was not good.

She couldn't even begin to come up with a lie to explain it, but her brain tried frantically to do so, anyway.

Natalie watched with mute, helpless dread as her friend followed the blood trail to the laundry room, which, of course, led her directly to Vachon...

Cornered, Vachon looked first at Natalie, and then at Grace's imposing form. Even if he'd had the ability to get away, there was no escape route. Natalie would have understood if he was frightened, but when she looked at his eyes, she saw more than fear. There was that blank emptiness she'd seen before. He was looking at something that wasn't there, and it terrified him.

<Damn, she wished she could think straight...>

"Who the hell are you?" Grace demanded. "What are you doing here?"

Natalie pushed past her and knelt next to the vampire. Then she made what turned out to be a huge mistake by gently grabbing his arm.

Vachon went nuts, screaming and thrashing in a frenzied effort to get away from her.

Natalie knew he was hallucinating again, but Grace thought he was attacking her.

Natalie would never have guessed that a woman Grace's size could move as fast as she did, but in seconds, she had Vachon pinned to the floor and was using language that would have made a sailor blush.

Oddly, her verbal abuse seemed to bring him back to his senses. She grabbed the hair on either side of his head and lifted his face up to hers. "Was it you who did that to Natalie?" she demanded.

Naturally, Vachon made things worse by replying, "I didn't want to hurt her."

"You no good son of a bitch.." Grace cuffed him a couple of times with her meaty fists before Natalie got her attention.

"Grace! Stop! Don't hurt him..."

Grace let Vachon go, with an angry warning not to move. Not that there was any way he could - Grace outweighed him by at least 50 pounds and was sitting on him.

Natalie used her calmest clinical voice to explain, "Grace, this is Nick's cousin... Xavier." She thought using Vachon's Spanish name might result in more questions. "He's the one I told you about. He didn't mean to hurt me..."

Grace looked at Natalie, then at Vachon, then back at Natalie. Clearly unconvinced, she finally stood up, anyway, brushing herself off as if she'd just come into contact with something distasteful.

All three of them were clearly at a loss for words. Natalie's Lie Factory had temporarily ceased production...

"You can get up off the floor," Grace told Vachon, in a tone several notches away from friendly. She still wasn't convinced he was innocent of battering Natalie senseless.

Vachon tried, but it was a monumental effort which Natalie couldn't bear to just stand and watch. She went to him. "He can't, Grace... give me a hand here."

Poor Grace looked like someone had hit her with a brick. Despite her outburst of righteous anger, the woman had a marshmallow for a heart. The sudden realization that she had just roughed up a disabled person devastated her.

"Oh my God..." she moaned. "I'm sorry. I didn't know..." She rushed to Natalie's side and together they managed to get Vachon off the floor and onto the couch in the living room.

Grace checked the bruises on his face. "Lord, I know I didn't do this to you... What happened?"

There was still a hint of suspicion in her voice.

"They were already there," Vachon said softly. "Sometimes I hurt myself."

Something clicked and Lies began to pour from Natalie's mouth once again. "It's a seizure disorder. Part of the syndrome."

"Psychomotor epilepsy?"

<Sure Grace, whatever you say...>

"Very much like it. Hallucinations, convulsions. He takes medication, but some of my treatments seem to have made it ineffective. Nick never had that problem, so I couldn't have foreseen that complication."

"And this is was what you couldn't explain to Dr. Turner?"

"Grace, you know why I can't discuss my research..."

Grace sighed. "I feel like such a damn fool!" She examined Vachon's face again. "For a minute there, I thought maybe you'd gotten a couple of licks in yourself, Natalie... Why were you hiding, anyway?" she said to Vachon.

Vachon shrugged. "I think I see things sometimes. And my nose was bleeding. Blood scares me."

Vachon looked up at her with those big brown eyes, forlorn and absolutely pathetic. Natalie had to hold back a laugh. The vampire had quickly found Grace's buttons and was now expertly pushing them.

Grace encircled him in a crushing hug. "I'm so sorry."

"It's okay, Grace, really," Natalie said, before Vachon carried his pity party any further.

"Natalie, you might have told me he was here," Grace said accusingly. "How was I supposed to know?"

"Sorry, Grace," Natalie said, not even wanting to try to come up with Lies to explain Vachon's presence. "I guess I must have been a bit more out of it at the hospital than I thought."

She attempted to distract Grace by asking her to fix an ice bag for her jaw, which was much needed by that time, and a microwave dinner for Vachon, which would end up in the trash the minute she was gone. Grace was a good friend, and Natalie just couldn't shove her out the door without letting her know she had been of some help.

She set the microwave plate of ravioli in front of Vachon, but gave Natalie a questioning look. "Can he eat this? I remember Nick had so many food allergies..."

"This won't bother me," Vachon assured her, truthfully, as he had no intention of eating it.

"Are you sure you don't want me to stay?" she asked, Natalie.

"No. Really. We'll be fine."

Grace looked doubtful, but finally gathered her purse and car keys. "Okay, but I'm going to call here every few hours to make sure you're okay."

"That's a good idea," Natalie agreed, guilty because she was doing so only to hasten Grace's departure.

Grace reached for the door knob. "What if he has another... episode?"

"I know what to look for now." Natalie winked. "This time, I'll duck."

\+ + + + + + +

Vachon poked a finger into the microwave ravioli in front of him, only to discover it was hot enough to burn him. He pulled it out instantly and gave Natalie a sheepish look. "Ouch."

Natalie fished a napkin out of her hamburger bag and wiped the hot tomato sauce off his finger.

"Have you eaten?"

He nodded. "I needed to. I was hungry."

"The blood on the kitchen floor?"

"I bit one of the bags. It came out faster than I could drink it. Then I heard you and your friend coming..." He pushed his hair out of his face. "She's a tough lady."

He picked his fork up and held it between his thumb and the palm of his hand and picked at the ravioli until he got one of the small pies open. He examined the contents carefully.

"Natalie... What happened yesterday... I didn't know what I was doing."

"I know, I know," Natalie reassured him. "Did you make the 911 call?"

He nodded.

"That was a big risk, Vachon. If they had found you here, you could have been arrested."

He shrugged. "I hid in the closet. They didn't even look for me. I did what I had to do."

Natalie's heart sank as memories came flooding back. Who had called the paramedics the night she had been found in Nick's apartment? Had Nick done that much for her? She wanted to think so. She wanted that so much. It would make it easier...

"Well, thank you, anyway... How are you feeling?"

He was moving his fork from ravioli to ravioli, systematically pulling them apart. "Better. But I think it's the blood that's causing the visions. I felt them coming this time, right after I drank."

He carefully lifted each of the exposed ravioli fillings and moved them to the side of the plate. Natalie noticed that he did not really have a proper grip on the fork, but was managing quite well with it, anyway. <They were smart... adaptable...>

"You want to tell me about them?"

He didn't look up from what he was doing. "About what?"

"These visions... these hallucinations... what is it you see?"

He still wouldn't look at her. "I don't want to talk about it."

"They frighten you."

He turned to her, with a look on his face that was almost belligerent. "Yeah, you could say that." Back to the ravioli. "When they happen... I can't tell it's not real."

No matter what he was saying, he _did_ want to talk about it, she sensed that.

"It might help if I knew what it is you think is happening. When I touched your arm, you thought I was going to hurt you?"

He laughed softly. "'Hurt' isn't a strong enough word..."

He was silent as he flipped the empty pasta squares over and began to stack them one on top of the other. Natalie didn't interrupt, but waited for him to continue.

"You've never seen anyone tortured." He stated that as the fact that it was.

"No."

"I did... There was nothing I could do. If I had tried to stop them, they would have killed me and done it, anyway. I was mortal then."

He sighed and closed his eyes, long, dark lashes resting against his cheeks. Bruises aside, there was still something perfect, something purely vampire about his face. For a moment, though, despite his outwardly youthful appearance, he looked incredibly old.

Without opening his eyes, he continued. "It was a little boy, 4 or 5 years old."

Suddenly, Natalie wasn't sure she wanted him to go on, but he did. He told her about witnessing a native ritual, one that had supposedly been banned by the Church, but which was still being performed in secret at the time he had arrived in the New World, before he'd sailed for Peru. It was one of many that demanded the sacrifice of a child, and in this particular instance, it was required that the child die in water, yet not drown. The little boy's hands and feet had been bound behind him and then his air passages had been filled with latex before he'd been immersed in a water-filled urn that was quickly sealed shut.

"I saw his eyes. No one knew we were watching, but he could see me where I was hiding. He looked right at me... After he was in the urn, you could hear him trying to get out. It took him a long time to die." He let out a sigh. "After it happened, I couldn't get it out of my head. I still have dreams about it."

"These hallucinations aren't just dreams, Vachon."

An ironic laugh. "No." He looked at her, as if he wondered if she would believe what he said next. "When they happen, I _am_ him... Everything they did to him, what I saw... It's happening to _me_. I feel the pain in his chest when no air would come in. I know how scared he was... It's the worst fear you can imagine, Natalie, and he was just this little tiny boy..." His voice tapered off to a whisper. "I feel everything he felt... How is that possible?"

Natalie had no idea what to say. This was much heavier than she had been prepared to deal with. All she could offer was, "Imagination can be a powerful thing."

"Divia wanted this to happen. Part of her was in me, and she wanted to experience what had happened to that little boy through me. The visions were constant. The fear never went away. Then, she made me see things that she had experienced, ugly things that she had done that she was proud of, and terrible things that had happened to her..." His voice softened again. "And, I was enjoying it."

Natalie looked at him, shocked. "What?"

"I know. It sounds sick. It _was_ sick. But these visions would trigger a physical response, like the one we experience when we feed on living blood... " He gave her a pained look. "Do I have to describe what that's like?"

"Nick told me it's erotic, sensual..."

Vachon looked embarrassed. "Yes. There really is no mortal word to describe it. Nothing mortals experience is like that. But whatever Divia did to me, it magnified the sensation until the pleasure was so intense it that I would have done anything to make it stop... I've never experienced anything that extreme. It was ripping my body apart, and the visions were destroying my mind." He let the fork slide onto the plate and covered his face with his hands. "Is this shit making any sense at all?"

Natalie reached for him and rubbed his shoulders lightly. She felt like she had to offer him something positive. "I think there might be a neurochemical basis for what's happening to you, something we can counteract. I'll run some more tests as soon as I can get back to my lab."

He looked at her and gave her a wry smile. "You're going to go to work looking like that?"

She gave him a playful nudge. The way she had done with Nick once or twice. "Well, you really know how to make a girl feel good about herself."

Nick would have teased her back with something funny. Vachon just smiled.

He finished rearranging the ravioli so that it suited him before he spoke again. In the meantime, the codeine-laced Tylenol Natalie had downed with her burger began to make her drowsy. She pulled her feet up onto the couch to get more comfortable and closed her eyes.

"Natalie?"

"Hmmm?"

Nothing. She finally opened her eyes to see if he was still there. He was, staring blankly at the food in front of him.

"I tried to call Tracy today."

Natalie sucked in a deep breath, and was more obvious about it than she meant to be. Vachon looked directly at her.

"Where is she? No one would tell me."

Natalie hated this. She was in no way ready for it. If she could have lied to him and gotten away with it, she would have seriously considered doing so, but she couldn't do that. Her stomach felt like a lead ball when she finally said the words.

Vachon looked at her, blinked. He had known, she was sure of that. He had just needed to hear it.

"How?" he asked quietly.

She told him everything.

"Nick blamed himself. If she had known he was a vampire, that he wasn't in any danger, she would have stayed where she was safe."

He closed his eyes, and turned his head downward again. "She stayed with me when I thought I was dying. She held me in her arms. If that had been the end, the last thing I would have known was that she cared about me. That made it easier, I think. I wasn't afraid..." He looked at her again, silently demanding an answer. "Who was with her?"

Natalie couldn't look at him. "Nick stayed until dawn. Her mother couldn't be located. Her father was out of town. He didn't get back in time. Capt. Reese stayed awhile, and then I went back to the hospital, but I was too late."

"She was alone when she died, then?"

Natalie nodded. "She was alone."

She waited for some kind of reaction, but he just stared at his hands. "She had a serious head injury, Vachon. She never woke up. She didn't know..."

He looked up suddenly. "She knew."

No tears. No display of emotion at all. But his pain was so intense she could feel it herself.

She sat up and took him into her arms.

Nick would have stiffened at her touch, or even pulled away.

Vachon let himself collapse against her, let his weakened body mold itself to hers.

His head rested on her shoulder, and she ran her hand over the thick, dark hair. It still smelled of shampoo, with the underlying slightly sweet, slightly metallic smell that she had come to subconsciously identify as a vampire's scent.

He didn't cry.

Nick had told her once that their tears were blood tears, but she'd never seen Nick cry, either.

Maybe it was something they didn't - or couldn't - do in front of humans.

But Vachon made no attempt to pull away from her. It was as if he needed to share her warmth, to feel her life force encircling him.

"Did you love her?" she asked him finally.

"I don't know if that's possible. What we are... I don't know if we can love... Or be loved."

She held him tighter. Even if he couldn't cry, she could. Hot tears coursed down her face.

<Oh, Nick, where the hell are you? Why did you leave? And how am I going to live without you?>

"You can be loved," she whispered to Vachon. "You can be..."


	8. Chapter 8

At some point, Natalie had rested her head on the cushioned arm of the couch and fallen asleep, with Vachon still in her arms, her chin resting on his head. He'd curled his legs up and had fallen asleep next to her.

It was a most compromising position, but what the hell? They were comfortable, and who was going to see them, anyway?

She looked at the clock on her VCR. It had been almost three hours since Vachon had taken the blood from the refrigerator, and he seemed to be okay.

She rubbed his arm gently. "Are you awake?"

"Yes."

She wiggled out from behind him. "You haven't gotten sick, from the blood, I mean."

"No... It hurts a little, but not bad. I'm okay."

Sidney had eaten Vachon's entire microwave dinner. If she had put anything remotely like it in his bowl, he would have tried to cover it, but apparently, eating it off the table right in front of her had, in his little cat mind, somehow rendered the cold, dissected pasta appetizing. She threw the plastic plate in the sink.

The phone rang.

It was Grace, calling to check up like she had said she would. Natalie convinced her everything was fine, and then listened to her apologize again for her rough treatment of Vachon. She loved the woman, but she thought she'd never stop talking.

Vachon stretched out on the couch, and when she hung up the phone, she got a blanket for him. Physically, he perhaps didn't feel any worse than she did at that point, but no one had just told her that someone she cared about was dead.

She couldn't pretend to know how he felt. How many mortal lifetimes had he been alive? How many times had he had to deal with mortal death? She didn't know, but even if he was used to it by now, it still hurt. She could see that on his face.

She sat down on the coffee table beside him. "Are you okay? About Tracy, I mean?"

He nodded, but said, "Nick should have known she was there. He should have done something."

"Nick took a bullet for her once, Vachon. If he could have done it this time, he would have. You have to believe that. There was nothing anyone could do. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's all."

He sighed. "I was her age when I was brought across. I was dying when it happened to me, and I remember thinking 'Not yet, I'm not ready'. I wonder if she had time..."

"She lost consciousness almost immediately, Vachon. I don't think she ever knew she was dying."

"Still, it doesn't seem fair somehow that I got a reprieve."

"Vachon, what happened to you doesn't happen to most people. Most of us just die."

"I know that, and sometimes I wonder 'Why me?', you know? I was nobody special. I was just there. In a certain place at a certain time. Like Tracy."

"Nothing mysterious about that, Vachon. It's called 'fate'."

"I guess so."

"You'll miss her, though."

"I always miss them."

Natalie knew that, emotionally, They were as vulnerable as mortals. They grieved. They became depressed - God knows she'd learned that much from Nick.

She had no idea how deeply Vachon had cared for Tracy. Was he just her informant, like she had told everyone? Were they good friends? Did he love her? Did they love each other?

All she could think of to say was, "I'm so sorry, Vachon."

"Yeah. I am, too."

True to her word, Grace called every two hours. Apparently, she figured Natalie kept night shift hours even when she didn't have to work. That was basically true, but she finally had to get severe with her friend and ask her not to call again because she was going to try to get some much needed rest.

In between Grace's calls, the night was not easy on either of them. Vachon knew she wasn't a hundred percent, and never complained or asked for anything, but the blood he'd swallowed did make him feel bad. Even though he kept it down, she could see he was in pain, and from the way he lay there not wanting to move, she suspected he was probably nauseated, too. He suffered no more hallucinations, but he did have two seizures, and after the second one, she learned that he'd been having several a day, she just hadn't seen them and he hadn't told her.

They were physically exhausting, but worse, he was embarrassed by them, which made him even more miserable.

She couldn't do much more than make sure he hadn't hurt himself and offer reassurance. "They aren't as bad as they could be." That was true. They were little more than tonic muscle contractions, and comparatively mild. "It almost takes a doctor like me to notice them."

"I notice them. I don't like it," he stated the obvious, which made her smile.

"I can prescribe something that's used for humans..."

"Will it make this not happen to me?"

"I really don't know... It might. It will mean swallowing something you won't like, though."

He nodded, already sleepy even though the sun would not be up for over an hour. "I can do that."

She gave him another liter or so of blood intravenously and prepared a syringe of the curare, just in case. No point in putting him through another hallucination, even if it meant poleaxing him - and even if she had felt up to dealing with it, which she most assuredly did not.

Here head was still pounding, and she had needed to take Tylenol continuously for her jaw. She planned on jumping into the shower and then crawling into bed.

Vachon seemed comfortable on the couch, so she'd left him there after removing the IV. He'd become quiet and withdrawn, but she concluded that was probably not abnormal, even for a vampire. He would need time to deal with Tracy's death.

The hot shower did wonders and she was feeling human <funny how she was now so conscious of that word> again when she walked into her bedroom in a bulky terry robe with her hair in a towel.

She sat in front of her dresser mirror and removed the towel. Behind her, reflected in the mirror, were the first rays of sunlight against the morning sky coming through the kitchen window.

Her mind was not perfectly clear at that point - the codeine in the Tylenol was having an effect - but something nagged at the back of her mind that all was not as well as it seemed.

She ignored it. She was too tired to think about it.

She pulled on some old, stretched-out leggings and a baggy tee- shirt, then tried to blow-dry her impossibly thick hair. Finally, she decided just to tie it back even though it was still damp, and leave it to worry about later.

She glanced again at the reflection in the mirror. The morning sky was beautiful, - purples, oranges, yellows - all streaked across midnight blue still sprinkled with stars, and below it, the golden crescent of the rising sun...

The window was supposed to be covered.

She turned around and saw Vachon standing calmly in front of it, waiting to be incinerated.

"What the hell are you doing?!" she shrieked.

He no longer possessed his keen vampire hearing. In fact, Natalie had reason to doubt he could even hear as well as she did. He must have thought she was still in the shower, because the sudden sound of her voice plainly startled him.

There was already a fine mist rising from his bare skin as the cells evaporated upon exposure to the distant rays of sunlight.

She yanked the sheet off the bed and ran at him, plowing into him like a football tackle and knocking him to the floor as she threw the sheet over him.

She left him to untangle himself while she quickly replaced the plastic garbage bags that had been covering the glass.

The kind, sympathetic Natalie abruptly departed while she was doing it. "I can't believe you did that!" she yelled at him. "All of this work... All of _my_ work trying to save your undead butt and now you try to barbecue yourself! What the hell were you thinking, Vachon? Would you like to tell me, because I don't understand this. Not any of it!"

He looked at her with those big, sad eyes, but that wasn't going to work, not this time. "Answer me, damn you!"

"It's not something I can explain, Natalie."

"Don't give me that mystical vampire angst crap, either. I had more than enough of that shit from Nick!"

He raised an eyebrow at her use of profanity. "I guess you really are mad..."

"I'm more than mad. I'm disgusted with the whole fang-faced bunch of you! And what about Tracy? Do you think this is what she would have wanted you to do?"

Vachon looked appropriately guilty.

"Do you?!" Natalie demanded of him.

He shook his head. "No. I guess not."

Seeing that she had made her point, Natalie softened her tone and extended her hand. "C'mon, get up. Let's see how bad it is."

He wasn't seriously injured, but it was bad enough. Mostly first degree burns and some second degree. She applied sunburn ointment to them and he winced more than once.

"You forgot these aren't going to heal in five minutes, didn't you?"

"I admit I didn't think of that... Ouch!"

"Well, I'd say it serves you right, but I really don't understand, Vachon. Why did you do this? You don't want to die."

"I know," he whispered. "If it means anything, I would have gotten out of the sun before I really got hurt. I always do."

Natalie stopped rubbing in the ointment and looked at him. "What do you mean, you always do? Have you done this before?"

His only reply was a shrug, but Natalie had just had her first hint that, as had been the case with Nick, there were many facets to this vampire's personality that she couldn't even guess at. <Can we mortals really understand Them?>

However, she was in no mood to assume the role of Natalie Lambert, Vampire Analyst.

She went into the kitchen to make some strong coffee. As long as the sun was still shining, there was no way she was going to sleep. It was a personal thing at this point. She wasn't about to have brought this vampire back from the brink of wherever it was the undead went only to wake up and find him a pile of ashes on the kitchen floor.

She got Vachon a soft, faded Blue Jays tee-shirt that had been washed a zillion times to keep the air off of his burns and to keep the burn ointment off her couch. He almost got it on by himself.

Whether he appreciated it or not, he was getting better, and she would _not_ let him undo that.

\+ + + + + + +

She did some laundry, including the new clothes she'd bought for Vachon. If he was at all like Nick, he wouldn't like the way new clothes felt against his sensitive skin.

She phoned in a prescription for liquid Dilantin. It was a pediatric formula, but she'd be guessing at the proper dosage for a vampire, anyway, so that didn't matter. She phoned Grace to pick it up on her way to work that night. She hadn't considered what time it was, and Grace was a remarkably good sport about being awakened out of a sound sleep. Grace knew Dilantin was an anticonvulsant, and was immediately concerned.

"It's for Nick's cousin," she sighed. "He ran out."

Interesting how lies just rolled out of her mouth almost without a thought these days. <Vampires will do that to you.>

With her fifth cup of coffee, she sat in the living room chair with her feet tucked under her, watching Vachon sleep. They were almost impossible to awaken when they sensed no danger, and she'd snuck in on Nick a couple of times while he slept. It had been unintentional, but she'd felt a bit ashamed of herself anyway for just sitting there and looking at him instead of leaving a note and returning later.

They looked most like vampires when they were sleeping. Their heartbeat dropped to almost non-existent and the color drained entirely from their already pale skin. Their muscles relaxed completely, causing their facial features to sink inward slightly, giving them a frail, sallow appearance. It would be very easy to mistake a sleeping vampire for a corpse, and the younger ones had difficulty waking when the sun was out. Nick had explained this was the reason they preferred to hide while they slept. It was too easy for them to be overpowered and dragged into the sunlight if they were discovered.

Vachon lay on his side, like a mortal would, but Nick had habitually slept on his back with his hands folded stiffly across his chest, like he was protecting himself from a stake in the heart. He looked like Bela Lugosi that way, and she'd wanted to tease him about that a time or two. But, she could never share that kind of humor with him. He'd take it the wrong way, and give her some lecture about what a curse it was to be a vampire...

<God, I miss you, Nick...>

Despite the caffeine overload, she finally fell asleep at around 4 in the afternoon, which gave her about five minutes of rest before the doorbell rang.

Natalie only answered it because she was certain it was Grace with Vachon's prescription.

Instead, she was greeted with a business card in her face that she couldn't focus her eyes on quickly enough to read. Codeine and caffeine were not conducive to visual acuity...

The woman was already in the door by the time she was done introducing herself as Marie something-or-other.

She wasn't with social services, but had a private practice counseling victims of domestic violence. Dr. Turner had given her Natalie's name when she'd noticed they lived in the same building.

"Look, really..." Natalie sighed. "Dr. Turner has it all wrong."

"Your boyfriend didn't kick you in the face?" she asked, as if she knew perfectly well he had.

Natalie was still trying to wake up completely. "No, of course he didn't... Well, he did, but he's not my boyfriend..."

By this time, Marie was far enough into the room to see Vachon on the couch.

"I mean, he's living here, but we're... uh... not..." Natalie knew she was babbling.

Marie put a hand on her shoulder. "Natalie, have you been drinking?" she asked gently.

"What? No. Yes, but just coffee..."

"What about your boyfriend?"

"No, he's just asleep. And he's not my boyfriend."

Vachon continued to sleep like a baby.

A bruised, scalded one.

Marie had noticed.

"What happened to him?"

Natalie resented the fact that she was once again having to explain something she'd gone over a dozen times already, and some little tiny thread of patience in her snapped. "I slugged the little bastard with a coffee pot and then I dumped it over his head."

Marie was aghast. "Oh my God..."

"I didn't hurt him. Much. He had it coming, don't you think?"

"Natalie, this is not a healthy way to deal with conflict in a relationship."

"Oh yeah? Why not?"

Marie didn't have an answer ready for that question, but to give her credit, her professional demeanor was unshaken.

"I think you both should really come in and see me. Dr. Turner was right to suspect there is a problem in this home."

"Well, tell the good doctor thank you, but to mind her own business."

Natalie opened the door, and gave Marie a look that told her she was expecting her to walk through it.

Once she had, Natalie smiled cheerfully as if nothing had happened. "Thank you for coming. I have your card. I'll keep in touch. Maybe we can do lunch sometime."

She shut and bolted the door and headed for the phone to call Dr. Turner.

While she waited for the answering service only to find out that the doctor was in surgery, and therefor beyond her wrath at that moment, Natalie noticed a foul odor in the room.

At first, she thought maybe it was Vachon's burns, but they really weren't that serious, or that extensive.

Besides, even if she didn't want to admit it, she knew what it was.

Reluctantly, she headed for the laundry room where she kept Sidney's litter box. She couldn't remember the last time she'd scooped it out, but it turned out it didn't matter anyway. He hadn't used it. Instead, he'd left her a hefty present under the coffee table. And, no doubt thanks to his Italian dinner, it was the loose, squishy stuff that smeared across the carpet like wet plaster when you tried to clean it up.

She uttered an appropriate swear word and then spent the next 25 minutes on her hands and knees with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of carpet cleaner.

After conquering that mess, she dragged herself into the kitchen to tackle the cat box, only to find that some of its contents had overflowed onto the linoleum, long enough ago that it had dried like paint.

After another 45 minutes, she stood leaning wearily on her mop. Cleaning up Sidney's mess had only revealed how embarrassingly in need of a cleaning the rest of her kitchen floor was, and as long as she was ready to drop from exhaustion, anyway, she'd figured she might as well finish the job.

While she was working, Grace had stopped by long enough to drop off the medication she hoped would stop Vachon's seizures, and to admonish her for using her sick leave to catch up on her housecleaning.

The good news was that somewhere along the way, the fiery ache in her jaw had abated to a dull, bearable throbbing. Unfortunately, by the time she emptied her mop water into the commode and flushed it, she was so tired that every other bone in her body seemed to ache. And it didn't help a bit to look into the bathroom mirror and see that her hair had dried into a frizzy, tangled mass, either.

With a sigh, she realized that it was well past sundown, which meant Vachon would probably wake up at any time. She'd still have to see that he got fed one way or the other, and give him the medication Grace had brought.

She was literally sagging with fatigue as she dragged her mop and bucket into the kitchen to put them away...

And walked right into the first vampire she'd ever met who really, truly scared her.


	9. Chapter 9

This was a female vampire, but she was neither graciously demure like Janette, or delicate and dainty as Urs had been.

She was as tall as LaCroix and about as feminine, even though she was dressed in a tasteful ivory business suit with, Natalie noticed, perfectly coordinated accessories.

Natalie wasn't sure how she knew immediately that the woman was a vampire, but when she opened her mouth and bared her fangs, all doubt was removed from her mind.

"Who are you?" Natalie asked nervously.

"You have one of ours," the woman said. "I've come for him."

"Why? He's perfectly safe here..."

"He is so weak I can barely feel him."

"So? He's getting better..."

"If he cannot survive by his own instincts, he must be destroyed. That is the Code."

Natalie wanted to tell her what profane act she could perform with her precious Code, but restrained herself. "You're one of those Enforcers, aren't you? Well, I don't subscribe to your rules. Sorry."

The Enforcer looked at her indulgently. "Then I will destroy you, too. Besides, it's not your choice to make..."

Natalie's eyes fixed on those of the Enforcer. She couldn't break away from that stare even though she tried. She could feel the blood pounding inside her skull and could almost actually feel her thoughts being pulled in a different direction than the way she wanted them to go.

"It's.. not.. my.. choice..." she heard herself utter. "STOP THAT!"

The Enforcer looked at her, perplexed, yet amused. "I was told you were strong."

Then, as if any further dealings with her would be completely insignificant, the Enforcer brushed past her and went to Vachon. He was wide awake by then, clearly intimidated by this woman, but he struggled to stand up in front of her.

"Don't hurt her," he said. "I'll do what you want."

Later, Natalie would look back on the incident and realize that stress, fatigue and heavy-duty pain-killers had clouded her judgement. At the time, however, she was merely pissed off.

"The hell you will!"

She stepped between Vachon and the Enforcer and the Enforcer promptly threw the two of them back into the kitchen. Just a gentle toss, really. Natalie was even able to land on her feet, albeit at a fast trot that caused her mid-section to hit the counter, knocking the wind out of her.

Vachon wasn't as lucky. A collision with the sharp corner of the counter top opened a two-inch gash in his scalp before he hit the floor. Blood gushed copiously over his forehead and into his hair, and then began to fall in drops on the white linoleum.

Sidney, nonplussed by the unusual activity, immediately went to investigate the blood, and decided it was snack time.

The enforcer grabbed Vachon's shirt and lifted him with one arm until their eyes met. She pulled him close to her and licked some of the blood from his forehead.

Vachon cringed.

"Look at you," the Enforcer said with contempt. "Full of poison and you're practically mortal."

Vachon was either possessed of very poor judgement, or he knew he had nothing to lose. His tone of voice was hostile, challenging. "Yeah? Well if you guys had done your job and taken care of that little bitch who did this to me..."

That was as far as he got. The Enforcer tossed him at the wall, which caused everything on it to fall to the floor, including the shelf on which sat a ceramic dinosaur that Natalie's late godchild had made for her.

Seeing it on the floor in several pieces broke Natalie's heart and also dissolved all of her connections to basic common sense.

She was sharing her apartment with a sick and possibly suicidal vampire who had almost kicked her head off. Her head ached, her jaw hurt, and she had now been awake almost 24 hours. Friends and complete strangers were suddenly prying into her personal life. Her living room smelled like cat shit, her hair looked like a Brillo pad, and now there was blood smeared all over her clean kitchen floor which her Cat from Hell was licking up...

She grabbed for her mop and in one continuous movement, she broke the handle across her thigh and raised the splintered half that didn't have a mop attached to it over her head.

She looked the Enforcer in the eye.

"Get the hell out of my house or so help me, I'll stake you!"

To say the Enforcer was surprised was an understatement.

But the big vampire quickly regained her composure. "You are all I was told you would be... Unfortunately, there is no way you can kill me, even if I were to allow you to try."

In a blur of movement, she snatched Natalie's makeshift stake and then splintered it between her thumb and first two fingers.

She took two menacing steps forward, until she and Natalie were almost nose to nose - or would have been if the Enforcer hadn't been 6 or 7 inches taller.

"Give me one reason not to kill you," the vampire hissed.

"Please leave her alone," Vachon pleaded. "It's me you want."

"BE SILENT!" the Enforcer growled at him.

Natalie spoke calmly. "I can't stop you if you want to kill me, or Vachon. I'm just telling you it isn't necessary. I've guarded your secrets for years, and I know more about your physiology than most of you know. I will do everything I can for him."

The Enforcer's gaze was condescending.

"Will you kill for him? How long do you think you can bring him blood in Coke bottles before someone notices what you're doing? What are you going to tell them when they ask? And what if they make you stop? He can't hunt. He can't feed. He has no purpose."

"So what? Who says he needs one?"

That made the Enforcer blink, but she recovered quickly. "How many of your own kind would you sacrifice to save this vampire? If he does not kill, he will die. If he does not die, he will kill."

This discussion was becoming too philosophical for Natalie's overtaxed brain circuits. "I can't think of him that way. I can't think of any of Them... of you... that way," she sighed.

The Enforcer pursed her lips in disgust. "Then you're a fool."

She grabbed Vachon's arm and jerked him roughly to his feet.

"Know this, Dr. Lambert. There are reasons I will not kill you," she said calmly. "Not the least of them is the fact that you are mortal, yet you do not fear us. You are not repulsed by us. You are, in fact, capable of actually loving us. Humans such as you are not only rare, but occasionally necessary. And there are those among us who feel that you should be brought across. It would displease them to be deprived of that possibility."

Natalie didn't think then was the time to argue that she didn't want to be a vampire, so she kept her mouth shut.

"As for you, whelp," the Enforcer shook Vachon like he was a rag doll. "You live only because she asks it."

She turned back to Natalie. "I must be alone with him."

"Why? What are you going to do to him?"

"He must feed." She grabbed Vachon's face with her free hand and looked at him like she was examining him for potential defects. "I assure you, he will enjoy it."

Vachon, Natalie noted, didn't seem a bit reluctant to go along with this.

She knew enough about them that she neither needed nor wanted any further explanation. She nodded her head towards the bedroom. The Enforcer lifted Vachon easily and carried him through the door, shutting it behind them.

Great. Now vampires were going to have sex in her bed.

She picked up her poor, broken mop and whacked Sidney with it so he'd leave the blood alone. She used it to clean up the blood that remained before pitching it in the trash. She snapped off what was left of the handle and kept it just in case. It was nice and sharp, and you never knew when a stake might come in handy, at least not if you were Natalie Lambert.

She replaced the wall hangings and nick-knacks that weren't broken, and got a broom to sweep up the ones that were. She couldn't bring herself to throw the shattered dinosaur away, and instead wrapped the pieces in a paper towel.

When she set it on the counter, she noticed a purse there that wasn't hers. It perfectly matched the Enforcer's perfectly matched accessories, as a matter of fact...

As tired as she was, curiosity got the better of her. She opened the brown leather bag and was disappointed to find that aside from a round-trip plane ticket from Atlanta to Toronto, its contents were not that much different from her own purse. Hairbrush, make-up, keys, checkbook, wallet...

She opened the wallet and found it contained over $10,000 in both Canadian and American bills. There was also a Georgia driver's license. The birthdate on it would have made the Enforcer 32 years old. "That bitch looks 40 if she's a day..." Natalie muttered. Weight 130 pounds. "Oh right! In your dreams, maybe." The name on the license was Lyllia Rose Hanover-Killingsworth. "Yeah," Natalie grunted. "and what's your real name? Myrtle Scruggs?" Everything on it was probably bogus.

She was returning everything to the bag when she noticed a folded slip of paper from a 5x7 note pad poking out of the keycase. Unfolding it, she saw only addresses, a few with phone numbers.

She was about to put it away when the name N. deBrabant caught her eye. Her heart skipped a beat.

Was that Nick? Of course it was. It had to be. Did this mean he was alive?!

The initials L.LC were penciled in beside the name. Lucien LaCroix.

There was no address or phone number, just a cryptic notation; "Soc- Linc C.L. 3 mi. d. S US Hwy 380" It made no sense to Natalie at that moment, but maybe when she wasn't so tired it would. She used a pen from Lyllia's purse to write the characters on the paper towel she had wrapped the dinosaur in.

After making certain there was nothing else on the paper that might be of value to her, she carefully returned it to the keycase and put the purse back where she had found it.

She looked in the refrigerator, found some orange juice, and poured herself a glass. She stretched out on the couch with the TV remote, found something she had no intention of watching, and seconds later was asleep.


	10. Chapter 10

Natalie awoke to discover that she had slept almost 13 hours. The sun was up, so if Lyllia hadn't already left, she was stuck with the Enforcer at least for the day.

But she found only Vachon in the bedroom, sleeping and not unconscious or dead. All of the blood had been washed out of his hair, and he'd either bathed and shaved or Lyllia had done it to him.

Amazingly, the bed had been neatly made up with clean sheets. The ones that had been on there before had been laundered along with the clothes Vachon had been wearing. Everything was sitting in a neatly folded pile on her dresser.

Well, she certainly couldn't fault Lyllia's housekeeping skills.

She knelt beside Vachon and examined him as best she could without disturbing him. All of the cuts, bruises and burns had healed. Only the lacerations on his neck had left faint red marks where the deepest gashes had been. The stake wound had been reduced to a barely noticeable indentation.

It had to have been Lyllia's blood that had done that. For a moment, she dared to hope the encounter had cured him completely, but even as she was thinking it, he had another seizure, and she remembered that she had never given him the Dilantin.

She went into the kitchen to prepare the medication and found the case of bottles on the counter. No doubt they contained blood, and no doubt it was human. She should have been appalled, but instead she was relieved that for the time being, at least, she didn't have to worry about how she was going to feed Vachon.

She used a veterinary syringe to inject the Dilantin directly into his stomach. That wouldn't work well on a human, but it was probably the best way to get it into him right then. She also drew some blood samples to take to work with her later that night. The needles didn't wake him up, but he hissed at her in his sleep. It was a reflex - if he'd really sensed she was trying to hurt him, he would have awakened, maybe before she'd even touched him.

She smoothed out his long, dark hair, gently working a few tangles out with her fingers.

Something about him was different. For the first time since she had been caring for him, he looked as if he were truly resting instead of yielding to sickness and exhaustion. He had never complained, but Natalie knew from the damage the poison had wreaked inside of his body that he'd probably been in constant pain before, even when he slept. Now, the tense, strained appearance was gone from his features. He wasn't hurting anymore.

She sat there for a few moments, studying him. Like Nick, he was perfect, even beautiful, his black, silky hair a striking contrast to his vampire-pale skin.

Nick said They were evil, but she had never believed that. Maybe some of Them used their abilities for evil purposes, but so did some mortals. If there was evil in Nick or Vachon, it was not pure. Nick's was tempered by his guilt and indominatable sense of morality. And there was an inherent gentleness about Vachon that Natalie suspected even the vampire in him shared. She did not want to believe either of them were capable of the sustained cruelty that was the trademark of true evil. Hell, even LaCroix probably wasn't all that bad...

_Divia._ Now that was Evil. But she had been the exception, not the rule, hadn't she?

As much as she would have liked to sit there and stare at the sleeping vampire, it did cross her mind that he might not appreciate it. She picked up her samples and left the room.

She showered, changed and tried to do something with her hair, and in the interim realized that her jaw was giving her very little pain. She figured she could get by on regular-strength Tylenol.

She experimented with her make-up to see how much of the damage she could conceal, and thought she had done a pretty good job until she shopped for groceries that afternoon. More than one person gave her a questioning or sympathetic look. Thankfully, no one tried to give her any advice.

She got home just as the sun was setting. Vachon was still in bed, but he was awake.

"You look better," Natalie told him.

He frowned slightly. "I think I am."

"Lyllia... her blood..."

"She's very old. Very powerful." He let his breath out. "The visions are gone."

Without going into the details of their encounter, which Natalie was certain had been intimate, Vachon told her how she had let him feed, and how even her blood had triggered the horror that was only in his mind.

She had restrained him, held him close to her so that he knew he was safe, that she would allow nothing to hurt him.

"You will not see these things!" she had commanded him, and even through the psychic agony, he had known his sanity depended on him giving up his will to her completely, letting her take this terrible thing away from him.

It took special skill and great power to hypnotize a vampire, and it had not been an easy thing to undergo. But suddenly, mercifully, he knew the visions for what they were; Divia's evil inside of him, evil that would not endure because Divia was dead.

Lyllia could not promise him that the visions wouldn't come back. Perhaps only time and healing could end them permanently. But if they did return, they would not control him.

"She isn't what I expected an Enforcer to be," Natalie commented.

"Enforcers are like cops. Some of them are Enforcers because they respect the Code and the protection it provides us. Others just want an excuse to bully other vampires."

"She was going to kill you."

"If it was needed. But she knew that you didn't learn of our existence from me. I didn't violate the Code."

"But she wanted to destroy you because you're... hurt..."

"She still might have to do that. But... " he cocked his head to one side and smiled, "she seems to think there's hope for me."

Natalie leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. "So do I..."

<Now _why_ did I do that?? > Suddenly embarrassed by the impulsive act, she handed over the clothes she'd bought for him and left him alone to get dressed.

Any hope she held that Lyllia's blood had been the miracle cure were quickly dispelled when it took him 25 minutes.

When he finally emerged from the bedroom, he looked frustrated, angry with that frail and uncooperative body that was now his.

She had put the groceries away and was fixing herself some scrambled eggs. She had poured blood into the big gas station mug for Vachon and stuck two straws in it, the way she had done before.

He leaned against the counter, watching her cook, sipping at his drink. His appetite had not improved, but the blood seemed to relax him.

He opened the paper towel containing the broken dinosaur and examined it.

"I could fix this," he said.

"Vachon, it's in a hundred little pieces..."

"59."

"What?"

"There's only 59 pieces."

He hadn't counted them. Some remarkable, unique adaptation of his vampire brain had told him in an instant how many there were. "Still, they're awfully small pieces..."

"I can see the difference in their shapes, and tell where everything goes."

To her, the smallest pieces looked like little more than dust. "Really? You can do that?"

"Well, right now I can't..." he squinted at the fragments. "But if my eyes get back to normal, I'll be able to." He tried to pick up one of the larger pieces, and was just barely able to get a grip on it. "I guess my hands would have to work better, too."

For a moment, he looked so sad that Natalie had to resist an impulse to hug him.

But looking at the paper towel, his expression quickly changed from downcast to curious. "What's this writing on here?" he asked her.

"Uh..." Natalie was unable to quickly come up with a lie to explain the cryptic notes she had copied from the piece of paper in Lyllia's handbag.

"Natalie?"

Why not the truth for a change? "I found that written on something in Lyllia's purse."

"Her purse?" Vachon's eyes gleamed with amusement. "You went through her purse?!"

Natalie put up her hands in surrender. "I confess. I did."

Vachon laughed, an action that seemed far easier for him than it had ever been for Nick.

"What does it mean?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I don't know. But it was written next to Nick's name, with LaCroix's initials beside it."

He studied them closely for a few moments before finally giving up. "Read it to me."

She frowned. The letters weren't that small, and she knew perfectly well he wasn't illiterate. "You can't read that?"

His tone was impatient. "I can't _see_ it clearly."

She hadn't dared examine his eyes. Nick had never been able to tolerate having a light shined in his. "Tell me what you do see."

He thought for a moment. "It's like a TV screen with very bad reception."

Natalie was curious. "How could you see all the dinosaur pieces then?"

"Their temperature is different from the paper. Heat gives off colors that we can see, but you can't."

She understood. It was the fact that they could detect the infra-red and ultra-violet spectrum that enabled them to see in the dark. Apparently, Vachon's ability to do that was unimpaired.

She pulled the paper towel towards her and read to him what it said.

"I don't get it," he frowned.

"Neither do I."

"It doesn't sound like an address."

"Unless it's some foreign country."

He took another sip.

"They could be directions."

"But to what? To where?"

"Read it again."

Natalie read. "Sock Link C L 3 miles d S U S H w y 380."

"Is that exactly the way it's written?"

"Uh... no."

"Read it to me exactly."

Natalie repeated it letter by letter, including spaces. Even before she was done, she saw it... "Of course! U.S. Highway 380. All we have to do is find out where that is. Maybe then the rest of it will make sense..." She shoved his mug towards him. "Eat, Vachon. You won't get well if you don't eat."

"You aren't my mother."

"Well, if she was here, she'd tell you the same thing, I'm sure."

Vachon smiled. "Yeah, she probably would."

Natalie was curious. She had to ask, "Can you remember her? I mean, that far back?" <How will Nick remember me a hundred years from now?>

He shrugged. "Of course I do. You don't forget things like that. I never saw her again, though, after I became... what I am."

"Why not?! How could you let her think you had just disappeared?"

He sighed. "You have to understand how it was then... For her, knowing what I had become would have been worse than thinking I was dead. I couldn't have fooled her. I was a fledgling vampire... an orphaned one, at that. I didn't have the knowledge or the control I needed to pretend I was mortal. And she was my mother. She would have known something wasn't right about me, and if she knew what I was, she would have staked me herself to put me out of my misery."

"Were you in misery?"

"No. But you didn't know my mother. It would have never occurred to her that her little Javito could possibly want to go on living as a demon," he laughed softly. "That was a long time ago."

"How old are you, anyway?"

He told her. "That sounds like a long time to a mortal, but some vampires would still consider that young and stupid."

"You're not stupid, Vachon."

"I should have known what Divia was. I should have sensed it. She laid a trap for me and I walked right into it."

He told her how Divia's masquerade as a frightened child had fooled him and given her the opportunity to attack him. "Like I said, stupid."

"It isn't stupid that you were trying to help her."

He looked at her. "Was I? Natalie, when I saw her in that alley, I was concerned, at first. I sensed the presence of another vampire, and I thought she'd been attacked. I don't know why I didn't realize it was _her_ I had sensed. I guess because she looked so... innocent. I looked for marks on her neck. When I didn't find any..."

He looked down at the dinosaur fragments. "If she hadn't attacked me... It was dark. We were alone. No one would have known if I had taken her."

"Vachon, you wouldn't have done that!" But she knew better.

He looked up at her. "You know us better than most mortals, Natalie, but you can't really know us completely. Not what we feel, not what we want, not what we are capable of..." He touched her cheek gently. "You must never trust us not to hurt you."


	11. Chapter 11

Back on the job, Natalie quickly grew weary of the sympathetic looks and the comments whispered behind her back. She felt like buying a tee-shirt that said "It was an accident" or "I am not battered" on it. After the second day, she quit trying to cover her fading bruises with make-up. Let them all get a good look and gossip if they wanted to. She had other things to worry about.

She had thoroughly analyzed Vachon's blood samples herself on a regular basis over a period of several days. She thought it unwise to subject Grace to whatever Vachon's exposure to Lyllia's blood might reveal.

The results were a disappointment. The Enforcer's blood had healed his injuries, but had not neutralized the poison, nor had it boosted his immune system like she had hoped. He still had almost no antibodies of any kind. She feared that meant he was not only susceptible to injury, but to every disease imaginable. If Divia's poison hadn't killed him, chances were, they wouldn't either, but, they could still make him sick.

That meant isolating him if he was going to recover without any more setbacks. She was going to have to keep him in her apartment, and take precautions to make sure she didn't bring any kind of bug home with her. It was not going to be an easy thing to tell him, especially since his recovery was already painfully slow.

He had improved a little every day, but he still lacked the stamina and coordination of a healthy mortal. He could walk again, but not well, and he had recovered only some of his manual dexterity.

The seizures had stopped, but Natalie suspected that was the Dilantin. She had stopped injecting it, and had instead switched to mixing it with a couple of ounces of blood in a shot glass. She'd given him a sugar-free breath mint to swallow to see if he could take pills. The mint was not really food, but he had told her it felt like a hot rock inside of him. He'd be miserable swallowing 6-8 pills a day, so she had decided to stick with the liquid medication. He seemed to be tolerating the drug, and she saw no reason to wean him off of it just to see what would happen.

He was able to read using the magnifying goggles she had borrowed from the lab. She had obtained a Rand-McNally road atlas of North America and he had spent considerable time going over the maps one at a time trying to find US Highway 380. He still tired easily, so it was going to take him awhile to get through them all. Natalie supposed there was probably somewhere the information could be obtained quickly, but she was still thinking about what she would do with the knowledge of where Nick was once she had it, and, it gave Vachon something to do.

She had discovered that Nick Knight didn't have a monopoly on vampire depression. Although Vachon was much less vocal about it, she knew he was troubled by what had happened to him and resentful about his situation in general. He wouldn't discuss it with her, though, and became angry and sullen if she brought it up.

As had happened the last couple of days, she expected to be greeted with moody silence when she got home that morning just after 3 AM.

But Vachon wasn't there.

She knew he had left the apartment once or twice, because there had been evidence of it; a current magazine, or groceries she didn't remember buying for herself.

He'd also purchased boots and a jacket with money Lyllia had given him, and when she looked, she discovered they were gone.

She checked the blood supply. Blood was being delivered from some anonymous source every two days now, but it was piling up. She couldn't get more than a liter a day into him. Feeding still made him nauseous, and she was certain he wasn't getting the nutrients he needed. There might be no choice but to return to intravenous feedings, something else she'd have to discuss with him.

When she found him.

She'd filled a mug for him before going to work, but it was sitting on the counter still more than half full.

She was pouring what was left down the sink when she saw the road atlas literally spread out on the counter. He had pulled three pages from it and laid them side by side. New Mexico and the maps of east and central Texas.

A shaky, scribbled pencil line traced the path of US Highway 380. He'd found it.

Her heart jumped as she studied the length of it from where it branched off Interstate 25 just south of a place called Socorro, New Mexico, to where it lost its identity in the nexus of thoroughfares in and around Dallas.

Then she noticed the scrap of notebook paper beside it. Vachon still could not hold a pencil properly, but he'd managed to leave her a note that didn't require too much effort to decipher. It said he'd be back, but not where he had gone.

She debated whether or not to go out and look for him. He'd be an easy target for any sociopath who wanted to take advantage of him, and unfortunately, he looked as vulnerable as he was. His movements were slow and awkward, and he needed to stop often to rest. Never mind that there were God knew how many varieties of germs he'd come into contact with. And where the hell could he be at 3 in the morning, anyway?

There was only one place she could think of. She put her jacket back on and headed for the abandoned church that he had once called his home.

The place would have been spooky in the daytime, but at night, illuminated only by her flashlight, it positively made her hair stand on end. She could hear things crawling around in corners. Bugs, or rats, or worse. She repeatedly walked into large cobwebs that only stuck to her hands when she tried to get them out of her hair.

She finally found the space where he had actually lived. It hadn't been disturbed, and she wondered at the fact that apparently no one had been in the church at all since he had left, even though she had easily found an unlocked door. Had someone been keeping the graveyard partiers and homeless away from the place?

Vachon's belongings were covered with dust, but untouched, including a guitar and amplifier that would have brought a good chunk of drug money to anyone who wanted to just walk out with them. Under a tarp, she found his red Triumph motorcycle. Alongside it was a rusted, beat- up bicycle that she had seen before. It had belonged to his friend Screed.

There was a dark stain beside a pointed piece of wood in front of an old couch. She picked up the stake and examined it. This was where he had died in Tracy's arms.

There were very few other things. Some clothing, which she gathered up, and a few books and magazines which she left alone. There were bottles like the one in her apartment, but sniffing one, she found the contents had putrefied.

There was no indication that Vachon had even been there that night.

\+ + + + + + +

She got back to her apartment at a quarter past 4, still more than two hours before the sun came up. She decided to wash the dust and cobwebs from the church off before deciding what to do next.

She took a quick shower and was toweling off when someone knocked on the door. She pulled on her terry robe and asked who it was before opening it, even though she knew.

"It's me, Natalie. Vachon." He sounded weak, tired. "I don't have a key."

She quickly opened the door for him.

"Oh my God, Vachon, what happened?!" He was drenched in blood, literally from head to toe. His clothes were black, so the stains weren't visible, but they were soaked, and his face and hands were covered with it. "Are you hurt?" She really couldn't tell.

"No." He took off his jacket and threw it in the corner. "No more than usual, anyway."

He pushed past her and went to the refrigerator, but he didn't open it. He leaned one arm against it and rested his head on it.

Natalie moved behind him and touched his shoulders to get him to look at her.

He jerked out of her grasp and turned on her. "LEAVE ME ALONE!"

His eyes were glowing, yellow with blood-red flecks, and it was the first time she'd actually seen his fangs extended to their full length.

The vampire was fully awakened, hungry and enraged.

Natalie stepped back, and fought the urge to hide from him. She felt like the owner of that cute pit bull puppy who had grown up and ripped the arm off the neighbor's kid. She knew the blood on Vachon wasn't his.

But, she let her physician's instincts take over.

She knew that in that state Vachon was at worst lethal and unable to control himself, and that at best he was aroused and uncomfortable.

Boldly, she edged him aside and got a bottle of blood from the refrigerator. She pulled out the cork with her teeth while she led Vachon to the table and sat him down.

She pushed the bottle into his mouth.

"Drink," she said gently. "You'll feel better."

He took a couple of greedy mouthfuls, but he was still unable to swallow large amounts quickly. It gagged him, which made him even madder. He shoved the bottle to the floor, splashing blood every where.

Natalie held her breath waiting for his next move, realizing that she might be in serious danger.

But Vachon folded his arms in front of him on the table and put his head down. His posture was one of utter defeat, and was painful to see.

Natalie pushed back his hair. "What happened?"

He didn't look up. "The Hunger came back. I had to take care of it."

She stayed calm, nonjudgmental. "Did you?"

"I tried. I couldn't."

She closed her eyes, fearing the worst. "Tell me."

"Some old wino sleeping in the park. I thought he wouldn't wake up... I opened the vein, but I couldn't drink fast enough. And, he fought me. I couldn't hold him. He bled to death before I could get enough."

He was very blunt, not interested in sparing her feelings at that point.

She put her hand on her forehead. "What did you do with the body, Vachon?"

"I left it. I couldn't move him. It was a wooded area. No one saw us."

Natalie wondered if she had become totally numb to these creatures. She felt no real shock, no revulsion. She pitied that poor, unwanted soul who had spent his last moments wondering what the hell was happening to him, but what was done was done.

She got another bottle from the refrigerator and filled his mug. She warmed it in the microwave before she gave it to him so he wouldn't have to drink it cold. <So it would taste more human...> She stuck two straws in it like she always did, to make it easier for him to drink.

"Slowly," she told him softly. "Small swallows so you don't choke on it."

He wouldn't take the mug, so she forced the straws between his lips. "Keep drinking until you're okay."

He closed his eyes and pulled the liquid into his mouth. She refilled the mug until he'd finished almost 3 mugs. By then his fangs had retracted and his eyes had returned to their natural brown color, but he was still tense and upset.

She urged him up out of the chair. "Let's go clean you up."

She lead him into the bathroom and turned on the shower. He pushed her hands away when she tried to remove the sticky, blood-soaked tee- shirt he was wearing.

He sat on the floor to remove his boots. The only reason Natalie hadn't advised him against getting them in the first place was because they did stabilize his ankles, making it easier for him to walk. But the laces were difficult for him to manage, and she couldn't even guess how much work it had been for him to tie them without her help. As he attempted to undo them, his uncoordinated fingers only succeeded in getting them hopelessly knotted. There was no way he was going to remedy the situation, but he kept trying, and getting angrier and angrier.

Finally, he punched the side of the cast-iron bathtub as hard as he could, because it happened to be there. That had to have hurt, but he didn't make a sound.

He put his head on his raised knee and wrapped his arms around his leg. His hair fell forward and completely obscured his face, but an almost imperceptible rising of his shoulders gave him away.

<They do cry.>

Her instincts told her that anything but casual indifference at that point would be the wrong move.

She knelt on the floor in front of him and removed the boots. And without a word, she pulled off the bloody shirt and unfastened his jeans. That was all she did. She knew she would have to leave him alone for now.


	12. Chapter 12

**Warning:** Graphic sexual content.

She threw the shirt in the washing machine, scrubbed the blood off the boots, cleaned up the spilled blood that Sidney hadn't yet managed to lap up off the kitchen floor, and then sank into her big, overstuffed chair.

The entire incident had taken on a surreal quality.

There was a confessed murderer in her shower, and she didn't think a thing of it. Or maybe she did, and the shock hadn't set in yet.

She sat there and let her mind go blank until he came out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist. He asked her what to do with the rest of his bloody clothes.

She took them from him and started the washing machine. She also retrieved his jacket and checked the washing instructions. "Professionally Clean Only."

Well, she hoped Lyllia had given him enough money to get another one. She sealed it in a garbage bag. The blood on it was going to start to stink in a couple of hours.

She walked in on him in the bedroom, trying to dry his hair off. She took the towel from him and did it for him, a friendly gesture rather than a pitying one, and he took it as such.

"Are you okay now?" she asked when she was done.

He gave her that wistful smile of his. "Yes. I'm sorry if I scared you."

She patted the side of his face playfully. "I gotta admit, the vampire act is pretty intense."

He grabbed her hand. Not hard. His grip was still practically non- existent.

"Thank you," he said. "For everything."

He pressed her palm to his lips and kissed it.

Then he looked at her. Not a vampire, a man. In those deep, dark eyes she saw... what? Affection? Longing?

He put his arms around her and hugged her close. Not strong arms, not like they should have been. Not like Nick's. But they held her for a long time. Longer than Nick had ever dared. And she just let them.

Finally, he pulled back and looked at her. Warm, gentle eyes in a cold, killer's body.

He caressed her cheek, stroked her hair.

Then he leaned forward and kissed her.

His mouth was cool and she felt the chill as his tongue brushed across her lips. She remembered what had happened each and every time she had tried this with Nick. It had ended up with him pulling away from her and hating himself and leaving her with a lonely, empty feeling that she would never be to him what she wanted to be.

Despite this, she found it surprisingly easy to respond to Vachon's kiss. When she felt his cold hands push the front of her robe apart and brush lightly across her breasts, she knew she should stop him, but she did not. She did not think Vachon would try to force himself on her, but maybe he wouldn't have to...

<What was she thinking!!?>

He backed away from the kiss, and touched her face again.

"Make love to me, Natalie."

<NO!>

Too many thoughts tried to crowd her mind at once. From a strictly clinical point of view, she knew enough psychology to know that _he_ had to know he could do this. From a common sense point of view, she knew it could end up with her dead. And from a point of view that completely bewildered her, she didn't _not_ want him...

She put her hand on his face. "Vachon..."

"I can't hurt you. I'm not strong enough. You'll be able to stop me if you have to."

That much was true. She was still physically stronger than he was, as well as faster and better coordinated.

He kissed her again, and she found herself sliding the towel from around his waist. It briefly crossed her mind that his nervous system might be so damaged he would not be able to perform, and she might be courting a liaison almost as disastrous as the one she had experienced with Nick.

He pushed her robe all the way open and pressed his body against hers. The soft hair on his chest and belly tickled her bare skin, and she could feel that whatever doubts she might have about his abilities were completely unfounded. She did have to fight the temptation to recoil from contact with his body, though. He was so incredibly _cold..._

<This is how it would have been with Nick. How it should have been, could have been...>

He put his hands on her lower back and pulled her hips up against his, rocking slowly, gently against her as her arms encircled him.

It had been so long since she had wanted any man but Nick. So long since any man had wanted her this way.

She let her robe drop to the floor and guided him down onto the bed.

His weight felt good against her, and the warmth from her body quickly made him feel less cold to her touch.

She caressed the length of his back, feeling the curves of the muscles, their firmness. She wondered if Nick would have felt that way. Maybe not. He wasn't built the same way Vachon was, less wiry, larger and more muscular. But that cool, cool, soft, perfect skin... that would have been the same. This is how it would have felt to touch him, to lay with him...

Whether it was her fantasies of Nick, or the fact that Vachon knew what he was doing - where to touch her and how - she was more than ready for him when he slid easily into her. He felt cold inside of her, but other than that, not different from a mortal <so much for vampire-romance novel proportions...>.

She forgot her guilt, forgot who <and what> she was with, and simply enjoyed it.

She thought he was enjoying it, too, but he kissed her lightly and abruptly stopped.

"Natalie?" Something was bothering him.

"Hmmm?"

He hesitated a moment. "There will be blood..."

"What?"

"When I... finish. It's blood. Not... what you're used to..."

She nodded. Nick had never shared this fact with her, but she had suspected it.

"It's okay," she told him, drawing him close to her again. "It's okay."

His efforts became more determined then, more deliberate... he knew exactly the right tempo, exactly the right intensity, and exactly when to modify both... <Well, he's had 500 years to learn>. This was apparently something he could still do as well as before he was hurt, and that seemed to give him the incentive to make the best of it for both of them.

At one point, he raised himself on his elbows and looked down at her, not breaking his rhythm. She closed her eyes so she didn't have to make eye contact.

<Does he know I wish he was Nick? If I look at him, he'll know.>

Luckily, he either lacked the motivation or the stamina to maintain that position for long, and after a few moments she could no longer feel those dark eyes on her.

Those eyes that weren't Nick's...

She felt his mouth on hers again, his tongue seeking hers. She returned the kiss, curiously exploring his mouth, the way she would have done Nick's if he had ever let her.

His fangs were sharp, although instead of the keen points she expected, she found the tips to be more like tiny serrated knives. They were only partially extended at that point, but she knew how vampires had sex, that those fangs were especially sensitive during intercourse. She ran her tongue down the length of each one, careful not to drag it across the razor sharp ends. She worked her way up to the base of one of them, and licked at it enthusiastically.

Suddenly, a convulsive spasm surged through Vachon's body, and she felt the fangs extend to their entire length. He broke the kiss and stopped moving completely, looking at her again. For a moment, she thought that she had caused him to lose control, that it was over.

But his eyes were gold, his fangs now plainly visible. He was still erect inside of her, still wanting. A low, deep growl rumbled in his throat. She'd heard Nick make a similar sound when he was angry, but this was more like a cat's purr. She saw that beyond the fangs there was the hint of a smile. Vachon wasn't angry. He was letting her know it felt good. He covered her mouth with his again, his tongue guiding hers towards his fangs, inviting her to continue.

His excitement aroused her. She had never done this for Nick. He'd never let her. And Vachon was eager and more than able to please her.

She unexpectedly climaxed well before he did, which was probably fortunate. She was still enjoying the last of her pleasure when his thrusts became forceful, more urgent... and his head dropped to the side of her neck.

She felt his cool breath against her ear, desperate, pleading... "I need to bite..." he panted. "I need to... now."

She considered just throwing him off of her. She could have done it. He wasn't _asking_ for permission, he was _telling_ her he was going to bite her, that he needed to do this to complete the act.

She took his head between her hands and forced him away from her neck, so that his mouth was against the trapezius muscle in her shoulder. There were no major blood vessels there.

He kept trying for her neck, but she held him off, until finally, unable to resist the demand of his body to bite _something_ , he sank his fangs deep into her flesh.

It hurt like hell, and he wasn't a bit gentle. Almost immediately, he was sucking fiercely at the wounds he'd made, determined to drink as much as he could get out of her unyielding flesh.

His thrusts continued, fierce and unabated, to the point where it was becoming painful. He was ready to come, and wanted to, but the stimulation just wasn't enough.

She knew what she was about to do was probably foolish, almost as soon as the thought formed in her mind to do it.

Keeping his head firmly in place with one hand, she pushed his hair away from his neck with the other.

She brushed her lips against his neck, and in response, his entire body strained with anticipation.

Their necks were sensitive to erotic stimulation. Nick had told her that much, and had never let her near that part of his body. Vachon, however, clearly wanted to be touched there. He wasn't holding back, yet she sensed that his need had become almost unbearable...

She bit him.

It was just a nip, a small fold of cold skin between her teeth. But she bit him hard enough to draw blood. Hard enough that the sensation made him gasp with pain and ecstacy. He moaned softly and instantly released himself inside of her.

<God, she was going to be sore later.>

His blood was in her mouth. Vampire blood.

She didn't realize it until she felt the odd tingling on her lips and in her mouth and throat. It was not at all unpleasant, but it brought her to her senses like an electric shock.

She quickly released him, stunned by what she had done.

Eventually, he was satisfied, and he slowly withdrew his fangs. She was going to have a historically massive hickey on her shoulder, and the bite would take days to heal, but she was hardly thinking of that at the moment.

He wiped his own blood from her lips and licked it off his fingers. As if he'd read her mind, he said softly, "You didn't drink enough. And I didn't drain you. It's okay. The effect will wear off in a few minutes."

She was a bit sorry to hear that. What she had done should have repulsed her, but instead had left her feeling strangely euphoric.

He withdrew from her and rolled onto his side next to her. She knew he had probably just used up every bit of the limited strength he had, that he had to be exhausted. His blood-sweat was on her body as well as his. They'd both have to shower again.

She sighed, relieved by what he'd just told her. "I'm sorry I did that to you."

He looked surprised. "I'm not." He slipped his arms around her so that his chest was pressed against her back. "The biting gives us pleasure. More than you could know. I liked it. I liked it a lot." He fingered the wounds on her shoulder tenderly, and then kissed them as if that would make them better. In a way, it did.

Their shared intimacy had been an experience she would not regret, but still, she had to tell him, "Vachon, we can't do this again. Not ever."

"I know."

"Please believe me, it has nothing to do with you..."

"I know. I know," he whispered softly. "I tasted it. It's in your blood. You love him very much. Maybe more than even you know."

She felt a tear roll down her cheek. "I can't make myself believe that I'll never see him again."

He buried his face in her thick hair. "I know how that feels."

She hesitated a moment before she dared to say it. "Tracy?"

He didn't answer right away, but finally said, "I could have saved her."

"You mean you would have made her what you are."

He released his hold on her ever so slightly. Her comment had hurt his feelings, and that was bad enough. But had her blood also told him that Nick had wanted to bring Tracy across? That it was her own petty jealousy that had stopped him? Did he also know that every time the image of Tracy's young, eager face, with that funny little smile of hers, flashed through her mind, she hated herself for that?

How do you make up for denying someone eternity?

"I didn't mean that the way it sounded, Vachon. I'm sorry."

He took a deep breath. "Natalie, I'm okay with what I am. I always have been."

"You've never been afraid?" Before she knew Nick, she would have been horrified to have awakened a vampire. <And now that she did know him?>

"I was a little, at first, but not because of what I had become. It was just so different." His tone lightened a bit. "And, of course, I'd pissed the Inka off right from the start..."

"Nick told me about him. He was your brother... your vampire brother..."

"More than a brother. A twin. Our master drank from us both before she brought us across. We shared not only her blood, but through her, we shared each other's blood as well. The vampires in us are identical... And I tried to kill him." He didn't sound particularly remorseful. In fact, he laughed and added, "Bad vampire."

"It's too bad what happened to him."

"Nothing happened to him," he said softly. "For whatever reason, he just decided to leave me alone for now."

"But the bomb..."

"He could have tossed that thing a mile into the air before it went off. I'd know if he was dead. I would have felt him die. I didn't. He's gone, but he's not dead."

"Nick hated being a vampire. He thought he was damned."

"I've never believed in damnation. Not even when I was mortal and still went to Mass."

"He thought that what you are is a curse."

Vachon laughed casually. "Some of us think Nick is a curse."

That hurt _her_. Now it was his turn to apologize. "Nick thinks he is evil, that we all are. Tracy thought that, too." There was more pain in his voice. "She told me."

"But she did love you, Vachon."

"Sometimes that's not enough, though, is it?"

She pulled his arms tighter around her. They both needed that closeness. "No. No it isn't." She thought then was the time to ask him what she had been wondering about. "Vachon, why did you burn yourself when you knew she was dead? I don't understand."

He thought about it so long she thought he wasn't going to answer. Finally he said, "Sometimes we can't _feel_ things, not like we want to. Mortal death never gets easier, especially when it's someone you care about. But after such a long time, grief just isn't there. You would think that would be a blessing, but it isn't." He sighed, "I couldn't hurt for Tracy, and I wanted to... I _needed_ to..."

"So you gave yourself the pain..."

"It was something I had to do. I don't expect you to understand. I really don't myself."

But suddenly she did understand. All those months... She had hurt for Nick not because she had lost him, but because she had rejected what he was, and as a result had never realized until that moment that she had loved the Vampire, too. She had grieved for the loss of only part of Nick, the part she could accept. Like Vachon, she wanted to hurt, but she couldn't. Not completely. Not until now...

The tears came freely. She couldn't stop them.

And Vachon knew. From her blood, he knew.

"We'll find him, Natalie," he whispered finally. "I promise."


	13. Chapter 13

Vachon's victim was delivered to the morgue two days later. Andrew Matthias was 44 years old, even though he appeared 20 years older, homeless, no known next of kin. His autopsy report stated that the cause of death was exsanguination, the result of a perforated carotid artery. It further reported that a piece of glass had been found lodged in his neck, and was the probable instrument of his death. No foul play was suspected. Indications were that he had probably fallen on it while in an inebriated state. Natalie signed the report. The non-existent piece of glass would get lost in the system somehow, and no one would care.

The lab work showed the poor man's blood alcohol level was almost high enough to kill him all by itself. He had not had long to live, anyway. Surprisingly - and lucky for Vachon - he didn't appear to have any communicable diseases more serious than a mild respiratory infection. His liver was inflamed, but, to Natalie's great relief, it turned out to be the result of too much booze and not an infectious form of hepatitis. In the heat of passion, as it were, she had failed to consider any blood-borne organisms Vachon might have ingested from this guy could have easily been passed on to her.

She finished filing the report, released Mr. Matthias' body for burial, and then went to the locker room to change out of her soiled scrubs before leaving for home.

Before putting her blouse back on, she took a look in the mirror at the bite marks on her shoulder. They weren't infected. She'd kept them clean, and had prescribed herself a course of antibiotics, just to be on the safe side. It was probably unnecessary, since, unlike humans, vampires did not harbor harmful bacteria in their mouths, but she really didn't need another trip to the hospital to explain the two deep puncture wounds and the saucer-sized bruise that surrounded them.

She rotated her shoulder to ease some of the stiffness. The bite did hurt.

"Good heavens, Natalie, what did you do to yourself!?"

Now where the hell had Grace materialized from??

"Uh... Hi, Grace."

Grace moved in for a closer look.

"Sweet Lord above, how did you get that?"

<Lie. Think of a lie.> <Today's quota already used up covering for Vachon...>

"My uh... neighbor has this pet komodo dragon and I didn't know that they bite and I was holding it and..."

Grace looked at her askance, not buying a word of it. Natalie didn't blame her. Even she thought that excuse was well beneath her usual talent for fabrication.

"Okay, the truth. It was so silly... I was reaching into my closet and there was a pair of scissors on the shelf I had forgotten about, and I pulled out a box and knocked it off the shelf and they were open and they stabbed me. It was a pretty high shelf, so I guess they fell with a lot of force..."

She was babbling, and Grace was still giving her that odd look that was her gentle way of saying 'bullshit'.

"I swear, that's the truth!" She quickly slipped her blouse on to cover the injury.

Grace continued to give her that you-are-really-losing-it-girlfriend stare of hers.

"What really happened, Natalie? Was it that guy you have living with you? That Xavier?"

For some reason, that made Natalie giggle. There was no reason she knew of that she should be in a good mood, but she was, and, in fact, had been ever since... <Ever since I drank his blood? Is that what did it?>

She gathered her belongings, preparing to leave. "You want the truth, Grace?" She pinched the large woman's cheek as she departed. "A vampire bit me."

Vachon had made a mess out of the apartment. He seemed to have an insatiable curiosity regarding everything she owned. It had only recently surfaced because up until then, he had been too sick to do much except lie quietly on the couch. But now he wanted to know what was on her book shelves, in her refrigerator, under the bathroom sink... The oddest things fascinated him; marshmallows, ant traps, frozen vegetables, popcorn, the green particles in Sidney's cat litter. Thanks to him, she now knew that bananas were actually divided into three longitudinal sections, and that chewing gum dissolved in peanut butter...

She had no deep dark secrets to hide, and to give him credit, he had stayed out of personal areas like her dresser drawers. But sometimes he dropped things, or had difficulty putting them back the way he found them, and he seemed perfectly happy to just leave them where they fell.

This time, he had left a container of ice cream melting on the counter.

"Vachon, the words 'freezer' and 'ICE cream' are not just a coincidence." She threw the soggy mess in the trash.

He looked up from the maps he was studying. He didn't need the goggles any more.

"Sorry."

"No you're not... Did you take your medication?"

"I forgot."

She took the shot glass out of the dishwasher, poured a teaspoonful of Dilantin into it, then filled the rest with blood. She swirled the concoction around to mix it and handed it to him. He hated the way it tasted, but he never made those funny faces that she had come to expect from Nick.

"I think I figured it out." He pushed the map in her direction. "See the green writing? The capital letters? Those are the names of counties. I think 'C.L.' means 'county line'. See those two counties?"

She looked where he set his finger down. In green capital letters were the names 'Socorro' and 'Lincoln', adjacent counties in southern New Mexico. He pointed to the notation 'Soc-Linc' she had copied from Lyllia's note paper. Natalie studied the map and the cryptic directions. "And the rest of it is 3 miles due south... 3 miles due south of Hwy 380 at the Socorro-Lincoln county line?"

"That's what I'm thinking." Vachon agreed with her conclusion.

"But there's nothing there, Vachon. No town, no road..." She noted a muted red outline on the map. "And you're really close to a military installation." The only marking on the map in the vicinity of that location was the word 'Malpais'.

"It's Spanish," Vachon informed her. "It means 'bad country' or 'badlands'."

And the adjacent military base was a missile range. Natalie didn't like the sound of either. "This doesn't sound too inviting."

"It's desert country."

"Why would LaCroix be there?"

Vachon shrugged. "Maybe he wanted privacy. A location like that wouldn't be easily accessible even to another vampire. Too much sun and no place to hide from it."

"But you think Nick is there."

"I think LaCroix is there. And I think Nick is with LaCroix. But there's only one way to find out for sure, and that's for me to go there."

Natalie didn't look up from the map. She had the absurd feeling that if she took her eyes off of this forsaken place where Nick might be, that it would go away. "Don't be ridiculous, Vachon. You aren't strong enough."

"Then come with me."

That did make her look up. "Are you crazy?"

He pretended to think that over. "Yes, but I'm getting over it."

"What are we going to do for money?"

"Lyllia gave me ten thousand dollars." He said this like it was something that happened to him every day. "I still have most of it."

Natalie was not at all sure this was something she wanted to do. It was one thing to dream of being reunited with Nick. It was quite another to go chasing after him without knowing what she might find, or even if he wanted to be found, especially if he was with LaCroix.

Even so, she found herself considering Vachon's idea.

"I don't have any more vacation or sick leave coming. I'd have to take a leave of absence..."

And she couldn't take money from Vachon. He might feel he owed it to her, but he didn't. Even though it was unintentional, he'd given purpose to a life she had thought was going nowhere. That had been payment enough. Besides, she had no idea how long it would take him to recover completely from the damage Divia had done to him. She had learned in one of her many conversations with Nick that Vachon occasionally earned money as a musician, but that was out of the question for now. He could no more play a guitar than he could take a stroll on the beach at noon. He'd need the money to support himself until he was well.

She would have to see how she was set financially before she made the decision to go without a paycheck for however long it took to find Nick...

It embarrassed her that she had not balanced her checkbook in months \- since before Nick had left, before the Assault.

After it had happened, she'd had no interest in shopping just to spend money. She knew how much she got paid, she knew how much went out in bills. She knew she had made no purchases that would have overdrawn her account, so she hadn't even opened her bank statements.

Perhaps she should have. The most recent one reflected a balance of over half a million dollars.

She showed it to Vachon. "Talk about a bank error in your favor..."

They began opening the other statements trying to figure out exactly when the error had occurred.

Vachon found it. $500,000 had been credited to the account just days after the Assault, while she had still been in a coma.

"I'll go in the morning and tell them it's a mistake."

But it wasn't a mistake. She spoke with the bank agent who had accepted the deposit.

"I remember it well. The gentleman came to my home and made special arrangements for me to meet him here after normal working hours."

Natalie gave him a suspicious glance. "Do you normally provide service like that?"

"Of cou... uh, well, no, not exactly, but he was so... persuasive." The man shook his head as if flies were buzzing around it. "Excuse me, but are you saying you didn't know about this? He did have your power of attorney..." The man fumbled through her file and came up with a neatly folded sheet of paper that he handed to her. Not surprisingly, it was completely blank. "I don't understand..." he stammered.

"Don't worry about it. Just tell me what he looked like."

The employee described the man who had put the money into her bank account.

_LaCroix._


	14. Chapter 14

Natalie's leave of absence had been arranged on the pretense that she had the opportunity to do forensic research at an ancient Native American archeological site. Everyone bought this except Grace, who nevertheless respected her privacy enough not to pry for details, even when Natalie asked her to cat-sit Sidney in her absence.

There were numerous other particulars that needed tending to. For one thing, they'd have to take Vachon's food supply along with them. As Natalie had suspected, there were all kinds of customs regulations regarding the transport of a possible biohazard across the border, and a ream of paperwork that had to be completed.

Also, Vachon would need identification to board a plane, and he didn't know what had happened to his driver's license. It had been in the pocket of his leather jacket, the one Tracy had buried him in. She had to have put it on him after she thought he was dead. Natalie hadn't thrown the ruined jacket out, but the license was no longer in it. Both Natalie and Vachon suspected the young detective might have kept it. Her personal belongings had long since been claimed from her desk at the precinct, and it would be awkward to contact her family about it. Vachon still had the forged documents he'd used to obtain it at the church, but it had been issued to J.D. Valdez, who was supposed to have died in a plane crash. If the DMV didn't catch that little detail, it would be no problem, but if they did question it...

They had no choice but to take a chance. With no vampire connections in Toronto, Vachon was on his own.

The scant information Vachon was able to scrape up on the Malpais revealed that it was a lava flow, fairly recent in geological terms. The terrain was so inhospitable that it could not be crossed without great risk, even on foot or horseback.

"How hard can it be to walk across a few flat rocks?" she had asked Vachon.

He could only shrug. He'd never been there. In fact, in 500 years, he'd never gone near a volcano. The idea of a mountain exploding and spewing molten rock was one he had preferred not to deal with. Even immortality had its limits. Still, he had every intention of being prepared for the inhospitable terrain, and his plans didn't include walking across it.

"I do _not_ think that is a good idea, Vachon. What happens if you dive off the roof and you _can't_ fly? Your broken bones aren't going to heal in an hour. They could take weeks."

"Then we'd just have to wait until then. But if this place is as bad as it sounds, we can't be marching all over it when we don't even know exactly what to look for. The best way to find anything will be from the air."

"Then we'll rent a helicopter..." <God knows we have the money...>

"Not that close to a U.S. military installation. They're kind of touchy about that sort of thing. At least vampires don't show up on radar."

She had to concede he had a point, and she had no doubt that LaCroix had picked such a remote area exactly for the reason that only a vampire would have a chance of finding it.

"Okay," she sighed. "But first you have to do something for me..."

She opened the coat closet in the living room to discover Vachon had probably already been through it. But what she was looking for was right where she had left it. She took out the box and set it in front of him.

He peered into it curiously. "Rollerblades?!" he laughed.

She was nonplussed. "Nick and I thought we'd try it once."

"Nick? On rollerblades?!" he laughed harder.

"What's so damn funny?" she said defensively. "A lot of people do it." She tossed the skates aside, and then shoved the box towards Vachon.

He studied the elbow pads, knee pads, wrist guards and helmet and then said "I am _not_ wearing those."

She planted the helmet on his head. "Yes, you are. We don't need you turning your brain into pate, and the rest will give you some protection if you fall like a rock."

They took the elevator up to the top floor, but climbing a flight of stairs was necessary to get to the roof. Vachon had a difficult time negotiating them, but did it on his own.

Natalie found a spot on the roof where the drop-off was only about a dozen feet onto the roof of the floor below.

Vachon just barely tolerated having the protective accessories strapped into place, but he did allow Natalie to steady him as he managed to get his legs over the guardrail.

His balance was terrible. If he didn't jump, he was likely to fall. Natalie clung to his arm with all her strength.

"Natalie?"

"What?"

"You're digging your fingernails into me. It hurts."

"I'm afraid you're going to fall."

He peered down, an uncertain look on his face.

"So am I."

"Then get down. You don't have to do this."

"Yes, I do." He gave her that funny little smile of his.

She understood. This wasn't macho bullshit. This was trying to be a vampire again. Even so, his next request surprised her.

"Push me."

"What?"

"Just count to three and push me..."

"Vachon, don't ask me to do that."

"Please. I'm ready. I just need a little... incentive."

"You're sure you're ready?"

"I'm sure."

"On three..."

She pushed him on two. By the time she got to three, she would have changed her mind.

She closed her eyes and waited to hear the thud as vampire met hard surface, but it never came. Just a faint scraping sound as he landed.

She peered over the edge. He hadn't landed standing up, but apparently he wasn't hurt. He slowly got to his feet, and with a soft whooshing sound, he was back at her side.

He could fly.

However, Natalie could offer no advice on whether it was safe for him to do so. She knew his physical limitations, but she didn't know how vampires flew. Nick had tried to explain it to her once. Apparently, there was a physical sensation involved, a feeling he described as that of being lifted by an invisible string that was anchored at the center of his body. But, when she had asked him if he did something to create this sensation, or if it was a manifestation of something that was already happening, he couldn't answer. So, did flight depend on physical strength and endurance, or was it only a matter of will, or both?

Vachon didn't seem to care a bit what the answer to that was. He was simply happy that he could do it.

He pushed the helmet off and kissed her on the cheek. "Let's go find him."

\+ + + + + + +

She updated her notes and performed a final set of blood and tissue analyses on Vachon before they left. Even though he was still a long way from being a healthy vampire, the fact that he was consuming blood normally again had resulted in noticeable improvements.

<Ironic how she had so hoped for a completely opposite result when her patient had been Nick...>

He still had no supernatural resistance to disease or injury, but was now producing minute numbers of those industrial-strength vampire antibodies. His sight and hearing were still nowhere near what they had been, but were almost perfect by mortal standards.

His mobility was still impaired, though, and Natalie could not help but wonder how much more she could be doing for him if he were human. There were numerous diagnostic tests that could reveal exactly what damage had occurred and where so she wouldn't have to stab in the dark, treating only his symptoms, and maybe get some real results. She also had no doubt that a good physical therapist could probably work wonders with him, but that, too, was out of the question.

And what was her idea of rehabilitation? Drag him across the continent to a place that apparently was not fit for man, beast _or_ vampire! She hoped they weren't both making a big mistake.

At work, she tucked her notes away where no one would think to look for them - in J.D. Valdez's autopsy folder. The file was inactive, and the folder virtually empty, indicating that the only remains found at the site of the plane crash had been a severed hand that could not be matched to any other passenger and therefore was presumed to have been his. No mention that the hand had mysteriously disappeared from a body bag at the makeshift morgue. Nick had seen to that.

As she moved to close the drawer, her finger brushed another, more recent folder. Tracy Vetter. Morbid curiosity lead Natalie to open it and review the findings. There were two photographs of her, one post- mortem, the other a larger version of her department ID photo, which was really quite flattering. <She would still be here if I hadn't stopped Nick...>

Before she put the folder back, she slipped the second picture into the pocket of her lab coat.

Vachon whammied himself a new driver's license. He was insufferably pleased with himself that he hadn't had to present any documents whatsoever, or demonstrate that he could operate a motor vehicle, which, given his physical condition, he probably could not. Natalie had to remind herself that illegal behavior was not something to applaud when he triumphantly showed her the little piece of plastic.

"So the whammy still works," she laughed as she examined the document. "You're lucky. What if it hadn't?"

"I would have just pretended I didn't know anything about getting a license and told her I'd come back later. But she was easy. Some people go under better than others. Some can resist no matter what you do, others, all you have to do is look at them and that's it, they're gone."

She handed his license back to him and remembered Tracy's photograph. She dug it out of her purse and handed it to him hesitantly.

"I wasn't sure, but I thought you might like to have this."

He looked at the picture for a long time, completely silent.

"Vachon?" Natalie said finally.

He touched his fingertips to the image, as if hoping that by doing so he could somehow feel her. She hoped she hadn't upset him.

"Thank you," he whispered finally. "This means a lot to me, Natalie."

And it was then that she knew why it was so important to him that he help her find Nick.

He knew what it was to lose someone without the chance to say good- bye.


	15. Chapter 15

Maybe Vachon just liked flying on airplanes, but his enthusiasm for air travel was infectious.

She had always thought flying was boring, except for the occasional will-we-get-airborne-before-the-runway-ends? takeoff or slam-dunk landing. But Vachon noticed everything - the wind direction, the position of the flaps, the rpm of the engines, the creak of the landing gear - and he delighted in every minute of it. She found it hard to believe he'd lived through a horrifying plane crash without suffering any apparent trauma whatsoever.

"This is one of the best things about living a long time," he told her when they were finally in the air en route from Toronto to Atlanta. "When I was..." he checked to make sure no one heard him, "mortal, you could be burned as a witch for even suggesting it was possible to do this." He looked out the window and sighed. "I remember the first airplanes, with the open cockpit and the engine right in your face. What a kick in the ass that was."

"But you can fly, anyway... You don't need a plane." Natalie was careful to keep her voice down.

"I know. But it's not the same... Did you see the movie _Top Gun_? I could fly those jets. Any vampire - a _fledgling_ vampire - could do that. But," he signed, "I'll never get the chance."

Abruptly the focus of his attention shifted to the contents of the seat pocket in front of him. There was the usual: the airline's magazine, a diagram of the exits, an airsick bag. He started reading the emergency landing instructions.

"Worried?" she asked him.

"About what?"

"Well, if I had survived a major airline disaster, I don't think I'd be as calm as you are."

"Oh, that. I don't remember any of it. The explosion must have knocked me out. One moment I was in the plane, the next I was waking up on the ground," he shrugged. "I never had the chance to be scared..." He gave her a thoughtful look. "I hope it was like that for everyone else."

She nodded, thinking of Schanke and Cohen. "So do I."

He leaned forward to put the card back into the pocket and froze. From the look on his face, Natalie couldn't tell if he was sick, or hallucinating again, or suffering a sudden attack of post-traumatic stress or what.

"Vachon? What's the matter?"

He turned his head slowly until he was almost staring at the back of his seat. His voice was just above a whisper. "There's another vampire on the plane. I just felt it."

She looked around, not knowing what it was she was looking for. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. And if I know he's here, he knows I'm here..." She got the vaguest hint that there was something else he wasn't telling her, but he brushed the whole thing off. "Maybe it's just a coincidence."

Maybe it was. The other vampire never revealed himself.

The Atlanta airport was busy, even though it was the middle of the night. It was also huge, and they discovered that getting to the correct gate for their connecting red-eye flight to Albuquerque required a substantial hike. Natalie had the foresight to arrange for a wheelchair, but Vachon gave her a "no way" look for her trouble. She piled their carry-on baggage in it, instead. Some people noticed that walking was difficult for him and stared, and she could tell that bothered him. For him, the trek might as well have been a marathon, but it wasn't until after six gates and 2 concourses, with 26 gates left to go, that he finally surrendered and sat in the chair.

Once on board the west-bound plane, he collapsed in his seat, totally exhausted. He was asleep before they were off the ground.

Natalie looked around but did not recognize any of the passengers from the previous flight, not that she would know the other vampire when she saw him, anyway. After a few minutes, she had put him completely out of her mind.

Thanks to a two-hour time zone difference, they arrived at their hotel in Albuquerque well before dawn. Natalie hoped it was just her imagination, but Vachon didn't look as well as he had a few hours before. He was extremely susceptible to any kind of infection, she knew, but she had hoped he would survive his brief exposure to the world outside of her apartment without picking up anything. Still, dragging him onto two airliners with questionably filtered air, and through a crowded international airport had been asking for trouble. He insisted he was fine, however, so she was willing to put it down to jet lag.

Natalie had requested adjoining rooms, and she had brought along the necessary materials to cover the windows. She left specific instructions that they were not to be disturbed by the housekeeping staff during the day, and for the amount of money they were paying for the rooms, she fully intended to raise hell if the instructions weren't followed.

At around 8:30 a.m., after a brief nap, she took the hotel's courtesy van to pick up the rental car she had reserved, a windowless dark grey 4-wheel drive with the rear seat removed. Such a specific request had cost her a great deal extra, but since they were making their foray into the desert at night, she selected a color least likely to be noticed. And the lack of windows was a precaution against them not getting back to a safe place before dawn.

She obtained a detailed map of New Mexico as well as directions to the nearest Wal-Mart, where she purchased 50+ sunblock and a heavy tarp to protect Vachon if it became necessary. She also found ice for the large Coleman cooler in which she had packed Vachon's food supply after pouring it into freezer bags. The bags had still been frozen solid when she had checked them upon arriving at the hotel. She'd removed three of them so they'd thaw out by the time Vachon woke up. He also had a couple of bags in his backpack, in case the airline had somehow lost the cooler. Natalie had been holding her breath that that wouldn't happen - she had no idea how she would find blood for him in a strange city.

She got back to the hotel, ready to crash for the remainder of the day, but her intuition told her to open the door between her room and Vachon's and check on him.

He was still asleep, but his breathing was shallow and raspy. She didn't like the sound of it. She approached the bed and put her hand to the side of his face. His skin was not as cool as it should have been.

Still, he seemed to be sound asleep and not uncomfortable. She left him alone, but kept the door open between the two rooms just in case.

It was still daylight when she woke up again, but Vachon slept well past sundown. She took advantage of the time in between to get some dinner in the hotel restaurant, a welcome break from the junk food she'd snacked on for the past 24-plus hours.

Vachon was in the shower when she got back. He'd already fed, and left the empty bags in assorted locations around the room. It wouldn't be a good idea to leave them for someone to find.

She was rinsing the last traces of blood out of them in her bathroom sink when he snuck up behind her.

"Vachon!"

"Sorry... Did you get everything?"

"Yes. Did you take your medicine?"

"Why do you always ask me that?"

"Because half the time the answer is 'no'."

"Well, I did," he answered, and then coughed and sneezed at the same time.

That made her turn around and look at him, concerned. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine." He wasn't lying, but she couldn't tell if he meant he felt well, or merely that he didn't feel bad.

She felt his forehead. "You've got a fever."

"Natalie, don't worry about me. No matter what it is, I'll live."

Her misgivings multiplied when he walked away from her limping. Not the odd, awkward way of walking he'd adapted, but actually looking like it caused him pain.

"What's the matter with your legs?"

"They hurt."

He didn't argue with her when she told him to take off his jeans, perhaps because at some point, he had decided to start wearing something underneath them.

She examined his legs. The were tight and sore, and his knees and ankles were red and painful. Her initial diagnosis was that the long walk at the airport had overstressed his weakened muscles and unstable joints, and that was no doubt part of it. But the inflammation was evident in his fingers, wrists, elbows and shoulders, too. It had come on so suddenly that she suspected some kind of septic arthritis, but what organism could have possibly caused it, she had no idea.

"I've got some disgusting, mortal disease, don't I?" he asked her finally.

"Apparently so, but I'd have to take out the textbooks to tell you which one." She didn't have a thermometer, but his temperature did not seem to be more than a couple of degrees above normal. Still, she started rummaging through her purse to see what she could give him for pain and fever. She found Motrin, which she sometimes needed when her bad knee flared up. It would work if he were human, but she'd never tried over-the-counter pain medication on one of Them.

Vachon declined the offer when she explained she didn't know how he'd react to it. He slowly pulled his jeans back on.

"It might help," she pointed out. She could see that his discomfort was more than he would admit.

"I feel okay, and right now, I can think straight. That's all I need." He fumbled with the snap on his jeans.

"Maybe we should wait, let you have tonight to rest."

"No, I want to go out there and at least take a look at the place." He gave her an affectionate peck on the cheek. "Don't worry about me, Natalie. Divia taught me what 'pain' means, and this is nothing."

\+ + + + + + +

Three hours later, they were looking out over a moonlit landscape that looked to Natalie like the surface of another planet.

Frothy black rocks jutted skyward in all directions, most of them looking like daggers. The sparse vegetation was equally hostile, mostly cactus. There were signs warning not to walk on the lava formation, explaining that, in many places, it was little more than a thin, easily fractured layer concealing deep depressions in the rock, and the result could be a nasty, possibly fatal, fall. Signs also cautioned that rattlesnakes nested in the many cracks and crevices, or sunned themselves on flat surfaces. Still others politely informed those who ignored the other warnings that the State of New Mexico was not responsible if they ended up injured, lost, poisoned or dead. There was even a yellow road crossing sign with a tarantula on it.

Vehicles were not allowed on the Malpais, but Natalie doubted that even a tank could get across the terrain, it was that rugged. It was a testimony to sheer human determination that Hwy 380 had ever been cut through it.

They pulled onto the narrow, often non-existent, road shoulder about 25 feet from the green highway sign that said "Entering Lincoln County."

Natalie wore heavy hiking boots, but could still feel the sharp volcanic cinders through the thick, rubber soles. A second too late, she realize that walking on the uneven surface had to be hell for Vachon. He tripped and fell full-length on the jagged little rocks.

She carefully helped him to his feet. She knew his knees and elbows already hurt, and having pointed little objects forced up against them could not have been fun. He'd scraped the heels of both hands raw, too. She used a kleenex to wipe the blood off.

"Guess we should have brought the rollerblading pads," he said.

"Would you have worn them?"

He smiled. "No."

After that, she held onto his arm to steady him. She didn't care if he wanted her help or not, and didn't ask his permission.

The darkness of the place seemed to suck in the beam from her flashlight.

"This is worse than I thought, Vachon."

He scratched at a spot on the base of his neck and sniffled. "I'm afraid you're right."

"Want to go back and reconsider?"

"No. We're here. Let's do what we came to do."

She returned to the car for his backpack, into which she placed the tarp, the sunscreen, and two frozen bags of blood. She also retrieved the two pairs of leather work gloves and the first aid kit she'd brought along. She removed a couple of gauze pads to cover the scrapes from his fall.

When she got back to him, she noticed him scratching again.

"What's making you itch?" she asked him, and without waiting for an answer, she pulled his hand away and looked with her flashlight. Just below his collar bone was what looked like a mosquito bite, although it was too late in the year for that.

"What is it?" he asked her.

"It looks like something bit you. How long have you had that?"

He shrugged. "A few days."

"Well, I suppose if it hasn't killed you by now, it won't."

The pack did not weigh that much, but when she slipped it onto his shoulders, he winced and stumbled backwards.

"Is it too heavy? Are you going to be able to fly with it?"

"I'm just a little sore. It's okay."

She positioned the gauze over the abrasions on his palms and then slipped his gloves onto his hands, carefully easing them over the inflamed joints.

"How will you know when you've gone three miles?" she wanted to know.

He shrugged. "I'll just know, the same way I'll know which way is south... It's a vampire thing."

She tugged the straps on his pack. "You'll be able to get this off if you have to?"

"Yes. Will you be okay here by yourself?"

They both knew what he was talking about. The place was, in a word, spooky.

"As long as my flashlight doesn't go out."

She smoothed the hair back from his face. "Be careful," she told him.

"Yeah." He smiled at her, then looked skyward and was gone.

Natalie knew that if anyone noticed the car, they'd be curious. She decided to wait out in the open, after leaving a note on the windshield saying that the car had run out of gas, and that someone would be coming to get it as soon as possible. She hoped this would satisfy any would-be good samaritans, and at the same time crossed her fingers that she wasn't offering an open invitation to someone to strip it clean or steal it.

She found a crevice that appeared to be unoccupied and was large enough for her to hide in if she spotted the headlights of an oncoming car.

Then, the waiting began.

Natalie concealed the beam of her flashlight when she saw headlights approaching. She remained hidden when two men exited a white pick-up and began examining the car. They spoke Spanish, but from their tone of voice, they seemed to be questioning what the vehicle was doing there. One of them found the note on the windshield and showed it to his companion. A few more words were exchanged and they replaced the note and drove off.

She looked at her watch. It was only 11:47. Vachon had been gone just over an hour.

Two more cars drove right on by. A third drove past and then reversed to come back. That time, a man and a woman checked the car out, then left. Natalie wished there was somewhere to park the vehicle so it couldn't be seen, but there just wasn't.

She also wished she'd thought to bring a thermos of coffee. The desert night air was becoming chilly. At least there were a couple of candy bars in her backpack. She took one out and unwrapped it, then looked at her watch again. 1:12.

How fast did vampires fly, anyway?

And what if Vachon had found LaCroix, and LaCroix wasn't in the mood to be found? LaCroix had no qualms about mistreating Nick, his own vampire child. Would he have any reservations about taking his anger or annoyance out on Vachon?

Vachon would be defenseless.

Why had she let him go?

Thinking about what might have happened to the vampire, she wasn't able to finish the candy bar. She tucked it back into the backpack next to Vachon's Dilantin. He'd miss the second dose, but he was forgetful, and often did that anyway.

2:02 AM. She got up to stretch her legs and looked out on the vast expanse of black rock, geological devastation as far as the eye could see. <Must have been one hell of an eruption.>

At 3:15, a state trooper pulled up. Natalie listened as he ran a make on the rental car. She breathed a sigh of relief when he didn't call for a tow truck, and instead only made a note of the vehicle's location to his dispatcher.

At 6:17, dawn woke her up. It took her a moment to remember where she was, and only an instant longer to realize that Vachon had never come back.


	16. Chapter 16

Vachon fought his way back to awareness, the Vampire voice inside of him screaming at him that daylight was coming.

He wanted to stay unconscious. He felt better that way. But the sun was coming up. He _had_ to wake up, had to try to ignore the fiery pain in his left side, had to find somewhere to hide...

He touched where it hurt the most. He wasn't bleeding anymore, but it was still there.

<Stupid, stupid, _pendejo_ , stupid!>

He should have known LaCroix would not leave his front door wide open.

He had no doubt that the booby trap was meant as a warning to their kind - that it was unlikely that a human on foot would ever have tripped it off, only something flying over it, bigger than a bird and close to the ground. Like a vampire.

If he'd still been able to see and move like a vampire, the three steel bolts from the three camouflaged launchers would have missed him, only letting him know he was not welcome there.

But only one had missed. Another had gone straight through his thigh and the third was stuck in his side.

The projectiles had sent him pummeling from the sky with enough force to knock him out.

Now, he was going to not-so-spontaneously combust if he didn't move his ass to someplace safe.

He really did _not_ need this crap.

He remembered the tarp in his backpack, but that ray of hope was extinguished when he discovered that the pack was skewered by the steel rod sticking out of his back.

He couldn't get it off, he couldn't reach it, and he didn't have the strength in his hands to grip the bolt and pull it out.

_Shit!_

The exertion made him cough, which opened up whole new horizons of pain. The damn thing must have gone through his lung.

He was sick, too. Natalie had warned him he was susceptible to human diseases. She hadn't told him he could come down with a dozen of them all at once.

Well, crying over it wasn't going to do any good.

He looked around, thinking it would be nice if his eyesight was better than it was.

Finally, he spotted a deep recess in the craggy rock and dragged himself to it. He fit into it nicely, but discovered that the bottom surface sloped at a perilous angle. He tried, but couldn't find a way to anchor himself. If he fell asleep, or had a seizure, he'd slide right out into the sunlight.

He'd have to force himself to stay awake all day. It was something he had never done before.

He started to think of Divia. If she wasn't already dead, he'd be thinking of ways to kill her for making him like this. Maybe pay a mortal to roast her a little bit at a time through a magnifying glass. Or stake her in a nice shaded spot where she would turn to ashes an inch at a time as the sun rose. Or maybe just drop her into a volcano. He'd get close to one for that.

He asked himself why she had done this to him. He didn't know her and had certainly never done anything to her, yet she had left him half-crazy, incapacitated and in incredible pain. If he had angered her, or had something that she wanted, maybe he would have been able to understand, but she had done this to him just because she was mean, and he happened to be there.

He wondered if he could have saved Urs if Divia hadn't attacked him, first. He knew he could have saved Tracy.

_Nick_ could have saved Tracy, damn him. Why did he listen to Natalie?... But he knew the answer to that. He listened to her because he loved her.

Ironically, he was able to forgive Natalie for Tracy's death. He had tasted in her blood the depth of her sorrow and regret for the fact that she had stopped Nick from bringing her across, and knew it was a heavy burden that she would carry with her forever.

Not that that left her completely off the hook...

Thinking of people - living, dead and undead - who pissed him off occasionally kept him awake when he actually wanted to sleep. In 500 years, there had to have been enough of them that if he counted them all, it might take all day. The list started with Eduardo Ramirez, who had knocked out his front teeth in a fistfight over the stolen affections of Esperanza Zaragosa, the first woman he had ever loved. True, they were milk teeth and the three of them were only 6 years old at the time, but some things just could not be forgiven. Maybe by the time he got to that little Whore of Satan, Divia, not to mention LaCroix whom he had to thank for his current deplorable situation, and Nick Knight, for letting Tracy die, and Natalie, for dragging him out here in the first place, it would be dark...

\+ + + + + + +

Natalie knew Vachon was either with LaCroix, or hiding himself from the daylight, or he was dead.

It would be insane to go looking for him.

But the thought that at that very moment he might be smoldering in the sunlight sickened her.

How long did it take Them to die that way? Was it quick? Or did they endure the unimaginable horror of being slowly cooked alive?

She was dressed for hiking - sturdy boots, heavy jeans, a denim shirt and jacket, leather gloves. She had brought along sunglasses and sunscreen, too.

She looked out over the rugged landscape. It would be work, but she could do it. Three miles wasn't that far.

After two hours, the car was just a dot behind her. She took some gauze from the first aid kit and tied it to a tall cactus so she'd continue to have a reference point.

Her knee was killing her. Climbing up and down uneven rocks was not something her legs were conditioned for, anyway.

She was thankful it wasn't the middle of summer. As it was, she had gotten hot enough to shed her jacket and roll up the sleeves on her shirt.

She snickered thinking of the casual remarks made about dry heat being more comfortable than humid heat. No one ever mentioned that dry air sucked the moisture right out of your body. You didn't even need to sweat first. She had already consumed almost half of the water she had with her.

If she didn't find Vachon soon, she'd have to return to the car and come back at night, when she'd be completely unable to negotiate the treacherous rocks. Her only hope would be that she'd find him waiting for her when she returned to that spot after sundown.

She had just decided not to think about him being dead when the world fell out from under her.

In one of those instants where a dozen thoughts flood the brain circuits at once, she recalled in vivid detail the warning about sink holes, just before she hit... what? The ground? No, she was below the surface...

The fall dazed her, but as she gradually regained her senses, she realized she wasn't hurt. She'd been holding her backpack in front of her and it had taken most of the impact. A few shards of volcanic rock from the ruptured surface had fallen with her and given her some minor cuts, and she was sure to have bruises galore to show for the fall, but she was okay. She hadn't hit her head. No difficulty breathing. No signs of impending shock or pain from internal bleeding. No fractured limbs.

She sat up and tried to assess her situation.

She was surrounded by foamy black rock, as if she'd popped a huge bubble and fallen into it. She was about 15 feet below the surface, in a hole with almost spherical sides.

There was no way out, and nobody knew she was there.

\+ + + + + + +

Vachon was hot, and hungry, and sick. The steel arrow felt like a branding iron in his side, it hurt so much, but at least it kept him awake. The intensity of the daylight burned his eyes, even if he kept them closed. His skin was not smoldering in the protection of his dark little crevice, but he knew he was getting the vampire equivalent of a sunburn.

And he was so sleepy.

He tried to remember if he'd ever felt so totally wretched. Crossing the ocean as a mortal, he'd been sick most of the way - seasickness, dysentery, infected sores from wearing clothes that were saturated with salt -but at least he'd had plenty of company in his misery. And when his kind had fallen victim to the mysterious Fever, at least he'd had his own clean, comfortable bed to suffer in, and Tracy by his side. Tracy had been there to ease the agony of Divia's attack, too.

Tracy...

<Go ahead, Jav, start thinking about Tracy and make yourself depressed on top of everything else...>

He could hear the rattlesnakes. They were probably looking for him just to bite him.

He'd been bitten by a rattlesnake in 1882. It had taken him only two hours to recover, but he didn't care to repeat the experience.

He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes, sleep and be rid of the pain for awhile. His side hurt, and forcing his aching joints to maintain the cramped position he was in was pure torture. He was sweating, and that was making the bite on his neck itch mercilessly. The more he scratched it, the further the itch spread.

Every time he nodded off, he felt himself sliding and had to force himself awake.

Dammit, he was _not_ going to die in the sun after all the work he'd put into staying alive.

\+ + + + + + +

Natalie looked in her backpack to see what she had, and how long it would last her.

The first thing she discovered was that the bottle of Dilantin had broken and it was all over everything else in the pack. Luckily, it hadn't had a chance to soak into the candy bars. She wouldn't have been able to eat them safely if it had.

Well, the first thing she'd have to do was get the prescription refilled. Abruptly discontinuing the drug was dangerous to mortals, and there was no reason to think it wouldn't be to Vachon, also.

No, that wasn't the first thing she had to do. The first thing she had to do was get out of there.

The pack also contained her jacket, the first aid kit, the sunscreen, her flashlight (but the extra batteries were in the car), and half a bottle of water. That was it.

She'd use the contents of the first aid kit to clean and bandage the injuries she had sustained in the fall, but first she removed a roll of gauze and tied one end of it through a buttonhole on her jacket. She unwound the gauze and then tossed the jacket out of the hole. Maybe someone would see it in the daylight, and if she was still there come night fall, she would use the gauze to pull it back down.

Even though there was nothing to do, she could not sit and do nothing. She picked up a piece of the broken pharmacy bottle and scratched it along the wall of her prison.

The lava was soft. Maybe even softer than the heavy piece of glass...

If she worked at it, maybe she could carve foot- and hand-holds in the rock and climb out...

She knew that was a stupid idea. She would eventually be trying to stand in and cling to these holds while digging at the rock with one free hand, on a surface that was anything but vertical. And how long would it take? Probably a lot longer than her water would hold out.

But she couldn't sit there and not try. That wasn't her.

She picked up the biggest piece of glass she could find and started scraping.

\+ + + + + + +

Vachon could think just clearly enough to be aware of two things: Pain and Darkness. The sun was gone. He could sleep now, if he didn't hurt so much.

He slid down out of his hiding place, but he wasn't able to move. His joints and muscles were locked in place, his skin was blistered from the sun, and he was just too weak from sickness and hunger.

The piece of metal still pierced his side and made it hard to breathe.

He wasn't going anywhere. But maybe if he could sleep...

Then what? Maybe he could find the strength to crawl back into his hole for another day? And the day after that?

Even if he'd been able to fly, he couldn't see. The daylight had almost blinded him.

His only hope was that Natalie would look for him, but she wouldn't be able to spot him at night, and in the daylight he'd be hidden from view...

Better not to think about that now. He was too tired...

Behind him, he heard the crunching sound that the sharp little cinders made when they were stepped on. He couldn't lift his head to turn around and look, but then he heard the sound again and again. Footsteps.

He felt the vampire. The same one he'd sensed on the plane. He didn't know whether to be afraid or relieved.

This same vampire sensed him more strongly than any other vampire could, he knew. And he, in return, knew him by the invisible but undeniable bloodlink they shared.

He could only see shadows, but he knew when the other vampire was kneeling beside him.

He knew The Inca wouldn't hurt him, not in this condition. If there was one thing their master had passed on to them both, it was a sense of fair play.

But, he might just leave him there.

He squinted his eyes, trying to make out the look on his twin's face to see what he might be thinking, but it was useless.

"I need help," he admitted finally.

"So I see... This will hurt."

The Inca gave him no time to question that statement. He grabbed the steel shaft stuck in his side and yanked it out.

Vachon screamed, and then made several genetically impossible references to the other vampire's ancestry.

"Shut up," The Inca told him. "You talk too much."

The routine scenario for their encounters would ordinarily have had them beating the hell out of each other by this point, so Vachon was surprised to find himself being lifted off the ground more gently than he probably deserved. A moment later, they were airborne.

Vachon didn't know where they were going, but he knew he was safe, for now. He let himself drift off to sleep.

\+ + + + + + +

Natalie had forced herself to consume no more than the half-eaten candy bar and a third of the water she had left. Her stomach ached with hunger, and she could think of nothing but how she had taken the convenient faucet on her kitchen sink for granted. Slow dehydration was a terrible way to die.

She had pulled her jacket down and put it on, and in the dark continued to scrape at the rock. She had two good holes after a day's work, but the glass had been worn down a mere sliver.

She tried not to see things in the shadows, because she dared not turn on her flashlight and use up the scant power that remained in the batteries. <Did snakes and tarantulas crawl around at night?> She'd need it to use as a signal if a miracle should happen and an aircraft should fly overhead, or someone should come walking by <fat chance of that!>

The flashlight was tucked away in her backpack out of reach when something _big_ dropped down into the hole with her. She let out an involuntary shriek before she was able to make out the outline of a man.

No, of course it wasn't a man. It was vampire. She knew that instinctively, even though all she could see was his silhouette. The long hair, the slender, wiry form...

"Vachon?"

"No," came the reply. "Come with me." He was extending his hand.

To take it without knowing who he was or what he wanted was foolhardy, but if given the choice of a nice, quick draining by a hungry vampire, and slowly turning into a piece of human jerky, she'd take her chances with the vampire.

She reached out to him, and in a breathtaking instant was swept into his arms, and then into the night sky.

The flight was short, but Natalie had never experienced anything like it.

Oh, if she could have flown with Nick!

The arms of the vampire who held her were strong, secure, but impersonal. He wasn't going to kill her. He would have done that where he found her, and no one would have discovered her body for months, maybe years. Maybe never. No, he was taking her somewhere, and until she found out where, she let herself enjoy this experience.

So astonishing was it that when they finally landed, she was scarcely breathing.

The vampire looked at her, and she knew the look on her face had to be one of utter awe and elation.

She saw him smile in the moonlight. Not Vachon, but she'd seen him before... at the precinct, after the plane crash...

"I am The Inca," he said, at the same instant she figured that out.

"Yes, I remember you... Don't you have a name?"

"Of course. Most vampires have many names."

"But you don't go around calling yourself 'the Inca' all the time, do you?"

"No."

"What does Vachon call you?"

"Chinche."

"That's a nice..."

"It means a bug."

"Oh. I take it you don't go by that, either."

He cocked his head to one side, exactly the same way Vachon did, and smiled. "The mortal name I was given was 'Amaru'. It is still the name I prefer."

"Amaru," Natalie repeated.

He indicted that she should follow him. "This way."

There was an opening in the lava. In the dark she didn't see it until the vampire disappeared into it, tugging her along behind him. Beyond it was a passageway that was completely dark. She hesitated, intimidated by the blackness of it.

"Do not be afraid," the vampire said softly. "I can see. Let me lead you."

They made a 90-degree turn and she saw a tiny light in the distance. When they reached it, there was a steel door with a security camera above it.

The Inca didn't knock or press any buttons. He just stood there, but after a few seconds the door opened.

On the other side was a spacious room, elegantly furnished. A large area of it was lower than the rest, and appeared to serve as a living room, with three couches and the biggest TV screen she'd ever seen. There was a large kitchen area, and a spot that was furnished with a desk, bookshelves and a computer. The space was twice the size of her entire apartment.

There was a heavy metal door to the right of the entryway, another door off of the office space, and a dark hallway leading out of the kitchen, which suggested there was even more to this underground dwelling.

She was about to ask the Inca where they were when the door in the office space opened up.

LaCroix emerged with a coffee mug in his hand and shut the door behind him. Natalie had the fleeting thought that a cup of coffee would be nice right then, but she knew that wasn't what he had in the mug.

The tall, blond vampire nodded curtly in her direction. "Dr. Lambert."

She nodded back, not sure what to say now. It was obvious neither of the two vampires were going to open the conversation.

"Vachon was with me. We got separated. Do you know..."

"He is here," LaCroix said in that Nightcrawler voice of his.

Natalie couldn't read exactly what he meant from the tone of his voice, and that scared her.

"What have you done with him?" She sounded more hostile than she intended, but the last thing she wished was to appear vulnerable in front of LaCroix, so she didn't rephrase the question.

LaCroix looked at her with a lifted eyebrow. "I fed him and gave him a place to rest. What did you think I would do with him?"

He wasn't insulted. He was amused. Damn him!

Their eyes met, but LaCroix made no further comment other than to say, "You must be hungry, too. Come. Eat."

Surprisingly, there was real food on hand. Not a lot of it, and it was all canned, but she was hungry enough to eat almost anything. She selected a can of corned beef hash and another of canned spaghetti. Normally, she would have found both totally disgusting, but after more than 24 hours without food, she could hardly wait for LaCroix to warm them in the microwave.

He couldn't find a can opener, so he ripped the lids off the cans easily with his fingernails. He scooped the contents onto a plate and as they heated, he explained that he preferred that the occasional carpenter or electrician or painter whose services were required not leave the premises until the job was done, so sometimes it was necessary that he feed them.

"They are brought out here at night, via a most... circuitous route. I pay them well, so they don't ask questions, and I prefer they have as little opportunity as possible to recall how to find this place again."

He set the plate before her. "I'm afraid all I can offer you to drink is water."

"Water is great." She dug into her food like a lumberjack.

She had dozens of questions she would/could/should ask him, but she'd think better on a full stomach.

Her first question was, "LaCroix, what are you doing out here? It must have cost a fortune to build this place."

He joined her at the table with a pitcher of water, and poured a glass for her. "A small one, yes, although not by today's standards. I had it built at the height of the Cold War, as a bomb shelter."

Natalie stopped her fork for just a moment. "Bomb shelter?"

"It was the 50s," he sighed. "And not even vampires know the effects of a thermonuclear detonation. Some theorized that radiation would affect us much the same as sunlight, and we would perish. Like so many mortals, I feared for the safety of my... family."

"Nick and Janette?"

"And others. A hundred vampires could have survived here, had it been necessary."

She gulped down all of the water in her glass, so he refilled it and continued.

"This place is almost as remote now as it was then. It was the logical place to bring Nicholas after... what happened in Toronto..."

Despite her hunger, Natalie's stomach lurched. "What did happen, LaCroix? Tell me."


	17. Chapter 17

He told her everything, and the story angered, fascinated and repulsed her.

According to LaCroix, Nick had drained her beyond her capacity to recover unless she was brought across. "But when that choice came, he could not do it. He could not make you what he is. So," he said casually, "he chose death for you."

Natalie's emotions were in turmoil. Why had Nick wanted her to die? He would have brought Tracy Vetter across if she hadn't stopped him. Why Tracy and not her?

And why was she hurt and angry about it now? Did she even want to be a vampire? She asked herself that, and found that the answer didn't matter. What mattered was that Nick had left her to die, exactly as she had feared.

But obviously, she wasn't dead, so what had happened?

"But, I'm alive... How..."

"Nicholas wanted to die with you," LaCroix explained. "He asked me to kill him." For the briefest instant, a look of intense pain flashed across his face.

"You couldn't do it." Natalie stated.

"No." He looked at her, his face still unrevealing, but his eyes betraying his emotion. "And when the choice became mine to make, I could not let you die, either. Nicholas loves you, and I... love him. I couldn't do that to him. Not again. Not this time."

His voice became devoid of emotion again as he recounted the details. He had incapacitated Nick with a blow to the head and then had opened Nick's wrist himself, so that he could give her Nick's blood.

"It is my belief that his blood is the only thing that saved you."

"But I didn't come across..."

LaCroix's expression became troubled. "I know. It didn't work the way it should have, and I don't know why."

Natalie's heart leaped. She thought of Janette, and how her passion for a mortal had freed her from the vampire within her. Had Nick...

"I know what you are thinking," LaCroix said gently. He shook his head. "Nicholas is not mortal. Sometimes," he sighed, "I don't think there is any human left in him at all any more."

Natalie thought that should have made LaCroix happy, but the sadness in his voice gave her a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She didn't know what to ask him next. She wanted to know if Nick was there, yet at the same time, she didn't feel ready to face him, not after what LaCroix had just told her.

She finished her meal, and decided to avoid the issue for now.

"Where is Vachon? Can I see him?"

He seemed relieved at the change of subject. "Of course."

He led her through the door he had walked through after she had arrived, the one off the study area.

Beyond it was a tiny room. A bed, a small dresser and a chair was all it had room for.

Vachon's clothes were piled on the floor. A crisp white sheet covered him, clean except for a small blood stain.

Natalie lifted it and saw the wound on his side. She also saw he was burned. Not badly, but extensively. His eyes fluttered open for a moment. He recognized her, smiled, and was out again. She asked LaCroix what had happened.

He told her about the perimeter defenses.

"What the hell do you need that for? You could have killed him!"

LaCroix was taken aback by her tone of voice.

"My dear Dr. Lambert, if I had wanted to kill him, I would have used wood. Steel won't kill a vampire. And besides, he should have been able to remove it. He should have healed in a few minutes."

"Well, he didn't, and he isn't going to."

Vachon was feverish, his breathing was congested, and he had that look that she'd seen before that told her that even asleep he was in pain. There was a patch of inflamed skin on his neck, and she immediately checked for fang marks. She didn't trust LaCroix as far as she could throw him. But on closer examination, she saw that the insect bite was apparently causing a rather pronounced, if localized, allergic reaction. It looked like he'd been scratching at it continuously.

She slumped into the chair beside the bed. She felt like she was starting all over with him, not to mention that the fact he was off the Dilantin cold-turkey was weighing on her mind.

"It was only a warning," LaCroix sounded almost apologetic. "I didn't know it was him."

"It's my fault, too," she sighed. "I shouldn't have brought him out here. He wasn't ready. He's too... fragile."

LaCroix sat down on the bed, so carefully Vachon didn't stir. He nodded at the younger vampire. "I was surprised to see him. I honestly thought he was dead."

"I don't know why he isn't. You can't imagine what he's been through... How did he get here?"

LaCroix nodded towards the Inca, who stood silently in a corner, his arms folded across his chest. "In the same manner in which you arrived."

Natalie turned to the other vampire. "How did you know to look for us?"

The Inca shrugged, and he did it exactly the same way Vachon did. "I followed you from Toronto."

"You were there? When? How long..."

"When he was hurt, I was half a world away, but still, I felt his pain. He thought he was dying, but he didn't really know what had been done to him. Then, I felt the exact moment that the stake was driven through his heart.

These things told me he was dead, and yet a part of me could still feel him," the vampire explained. "I sensed a blackness surrounding him, and his fear became my own. I had to understand it. I had to know what had happened to him. By the time I found him, he was with you. You did what you could, and I did what was needed to help."

"The blood. You arranged for that?"

He nodded. She remembered how none of Vachon's belongings had been disturbed at the church. That had probably been the Inca's doing, too.

And of course, he had also been the vampire on the plane. Vachon had known that.

"He is very ill, and so weak..." LaCroix commented, looking at Vachon again.

Natalie nodded. "He's better than he was, but I don't know if he'll ever recover completely. There was just too much damage."

"I can scarcely feel the vampire in him."

"It's there. He's a vampire in a body that is less than mortal. I can't even pretend to know what that must be like."

"Was it Divia who did this to him?"

"Yes. Somehow, she poisoned him. I haven't figured out how it was done."

LaCroix took a deep breath. He knew something about what had happened to Vachon, something he wasn't telling.

"What is it, LaCroix?"

He shook his head. "Even if you knew, it wouldn't help him."

"Tell me, anyway. I'll decide that."

He hesitated several seconds. His eyes closed as if recalling a painful memory.

Finally, he spoke. "Are you familiar with an ancient practice called venification?"

"No," Natalie said truthfully. "I've never heard of it."

"It is a process by which a child - most often a girl - is converted into the perfect assassin. It begins at birth."

"They are trained to kill?!"

"Oh no, my dear. It's much more insidious than that. The mother or wet-nurse is fed poison in minute doses so that the child receives it at the breast. After it is weaned, the amount is increased. Never enough to kill the child, or even make it seriously ill. Not usually, anyway. But year by year, a little more is given, a little at a time. By the time the child reaches puberty, its body fluids are so saturated, they are lethal."

"That's impossible..."

"No, it is simply no longer heard of. I assure you, it _is_ possible."

Natalie then realized what he was trying to tell her. "Divia?! Your own daughter?!"

He nodded grimly. "At the right age, these children, these _veneficas_ , are presented to the intended victim, either as a gift, or as a wife or a prostitute. Nature is simply allowed to take its course, and the man dies during the act, or immediately thereafter."

"That's the most cruel and barbaric thing I've ever heard of!"

He gave her a scornful look. "Then in that case, you have heard very little. I assure you, it's a better death than many of them deserve."

"But what about the children? What happens to them?"

"Obviously romance is out of the question," he snickered, for a moment living up to the image she had of him. "Although they usually die at quite a young age, anyway."

"How could you?! Your own child!"

"It was a different time, and those were different circumstances, and I never knew that I would... come to love her." He paused for a moment to collect his thoughts. "As it was, she was one of those unfortunates who was dying from the process itself when her master came to her. She knew this. I don't know if what had been done to her affected her mind in some way, or if her evil and hatred were born into her, but it was there. Always, I could see it, even when she was very small." He sighed heavily. "We had made her into something that was not human, and when she was brought across, she became something unique. She was not just a vampire. She was a greater evil, a demon incarnate. Her poison was physically magnified, so that she was able to visit death upon mortals just by her touch alone, and she was not content with inflicting horrifying physical pain.

"All vampires are able to shape the thoughts of most humans to some extent, and Divia could do this even with vampires. She had the ability to reach into the mind and flood it with her essence. They would experience her being from the inside, all the horrors she had been a party to, the atrocities. She would in turn derive pleasure from their suffering, seeking out the memory of the worst thing a person - or vampire - had ever experienced and making them relive it from the most terrifying perspective possible so that she could savor the evil... She was... quite talented..."

Natalie remembered what Vachon had told her about his hallucinations. "Vachon saw a child die by torture."

LaCroix closed his eyes briefly as if struck a blow. "And he re- experienced it as the child."

"How did you know?"

A small laugh. "I know Divia..." He continued, "Because her master had such power, and because this inhuman capacity to destroy was already an integral part of who she was, she became this _thing_ that was beyond even the ability of her master to control. She might have destroyed us all, including me.

"I know how powerful she was." He shook his head. "I don't know how one as young as Vachon endured it."

He clasped one of Vachon's hands in his own. Natalie could have sworn there was a hint of affection in the gesture, but when he spoke, his tone was once again purely academic.

"A fascinating creature, don't you agree?" he referred to Vachon. "No guilt, no remorse, no conflicts about what he is. And yet something about him motivates you to help him regain an existence which you consider evil."

"He's not evil."

"But he is a vampire."

She saw what he was getting at. "He is what he is. I can accept that."

Another raised eyebrow. "Can you? Can you now?"

Before she could respond, both LaCroix and the Inxa were suddenly alert, turning towards the doorway before Natalie even heard or saw anyone approach.

Then, he was right there in the room.

Those familiar deep blue-grey eyes darted from face to face, cold, like a snake's eyes, without the slightest hint of emotion, curiosity or even recognition. When they fixed on Natalie, they sent a chill down her spine, which was the last reaction she would have anticipated.

She rose slowly from her chair and took a tentative step towards him.

"Nick?"


	18. Chapter 18

Natalie's first instincts were to run to him and embrace him, but something in that stare of his stopped her in her tracks.

There was no response when she said his name. He just kept looking at her.

LaCroix was at his side in an instant.

"Nicholas, do you remember Natalie?"

Something was terribly wrong. LaCroix sounded like he was talking to a 3-year-old, and Natalie didn't know what was worse, the fact that at first he got no reaction from Nick at all or that when he finally did, Nick hissed at her, his fangs bared.

LaCroix shook him, hard. "Stop it, Nicholas!"

Nick's gaze turned towards LaCroix, but there was nothing behind those blue eyes but a void.

The entire scene had not gone unnoticed by the Inca. Natalie saw his muscles tense, the hint of gold in his eyes. He saw Nick as a threat, and he was prepared to fight.

LaCroix placed his hand on Nick's shoulder.

"Go, Nicholas. Nothing here concerns you."

Nick didn't move. He kept looking at Natalie, still no recognition, no feeling in those cold, cold eyes, only that reptilian glare.

"Go!" LaCroix barked.

Nick turned his eyes towards him, and then looked at the other two vampires, but his expression did not convey the slightest hint of interest in any of them. Without a word, he left.

Natalie moved to follow him, but LaCroix stopped her.

"Not yet, Dr. Lambert. We must talk, first."

The Inca stayed with Vachon, as if he had no intention of leaving his side. He was afraid of something. Was it that Nick would harm his defenseless twin? That was how it appeared to Natalie. What had the Inca sensed from Nick?

She followed LaCroix into the sunken living room. She hadn't seen it before, but the ceiling was glass, and the spectacular star-studded desert night sky was revealed when LaCroix used a remote to open the shutters that kept the daylight out. The view was exquisite.

She hadn't seen where Nick had gone, but he was nowhere in sight.

LaCroix beckoned her to one of the couches.

"You're limping," he noticed.

"It's my knee. It acts up once in awhile. Hiking across rocks didn't help."

He nodded as she sank into the comfortable sofa, glad to take the weight off of her leg.

"No more small talk, LaCroix," she said. "What's wrong with Nick? What did you do to him?"

LaCroix gave her an ironic smile. "My dear, that is the second time you have asked me that. Why do you assume I wish to 'do' anything to anyone?"

"Because I know you."

"No, you do not. You know only what Nicholas has let you know."

He had her on that one, so she got back to the subject. "He didn't recognize me."

"Oh, I believe he did. Some part of him knew it was you."

Oddly, Natalie believed that, too, even though she'd seen no evidence to support that belief.

"You can't think something isn't wrong, LaCroix. He's like a robot, or a zombie. What on earth happened?"

LaCroix slumped forward. For an instant, he looked all of his 2000 years. When he looked up at her, the cocky, urbane facade had been stripped away. Underneath was a father who stood by while his child suffered, unable to ease the pain.

"Dr. Lambert, I have asked myself that same question many, many times."

The look on his face scared her more than the sight of Nick had. "How long has he been like this?"

"Since Toronto. Since the last night he spent with you... At first I thought perhaps it was just the shock of what had happened. He thought he had killed you, and that was just too much for him. I thought that if I could assure him you were alive, he would be fine, but there was no convincing him. He was then just as you saw him now. My words mean nothing to him."

"But just now, he did what you asked..."

"He understands my tone of voice, or the physical contact, that is all. I cannot talk to him."

Natalie's stomach was doing flip-flops. What could have done this?

"I do not want to believe he has gone mad... I have even considered the possibility that I hit him too hard and somehow damaged his brain, even though I know that's ridiculous. But what else can I think?

"He doesn't speak, and I don't know if it's that he can't or that he won't. If I did not see to it that he fed, I believe he would allow himself to starve. Books, movies, music... none of that interests him... He still paints. That is the only indication that my Nicholas is still there, somewhere inside that shell you saw."

A hundred thoughts raced through Natalie's mind at once, but finally, the physician in her allowed one to emerge above the others. "I want to examine him," she said.

"He won't let you. He won't let anyone but me touch him."

"Please, LaCroix. I have to try. Maybe I can help him. You don't want him to go on like that, do you?"

She expected another disdainful glare, but there was just that pained gaze. <He looks so _human_! >

"No. No, I do not."

She followed him through the steel door. On the other side was a maze of rooms, most with the doors closed.

The one they entered was large, paneled in oak. Half of the floor was maple, the other half covered by plush and expensive charcoal carpet. There was no furniture, just some pillows.

The walls were covered with what at first appeared to be sheets of colored canvas. However, when Natalie looked closely, she saw they were paintings. They were so very odd, all done in one color with only the direction of the brush strokes delineating the different components, sometimes down to painstakingly minute detail. They depicted scenes of death, destruction, and desolation. A blinding yellow sun radiated merciless heat on withered yellow wheat, a verdant jungle teemed with vicious green insects, a black pit swallowed a screaming black skull.

Natalie was no psychiatrist, but her first impression was that this was the work of a very troubled mind.

She had expected to find Nick standing at his easel, the way she had found him so many times alone in his apartment.

But he was sitting on the floor, a red canvass spread out before him. He had folded himself in half so that his face was up against the canvas as he concentrated on a tiny area with a paintbrush no bigger than a toothpick. Hunched over like he was, Natalie noticed the outline of his spine and shoulder blades, which in turn drew her attention to his arms, the only part of him not covered by clothing. How incredibly thin he was! Even Vachon, as sick as he had been, did not look like that.

He didn't appear to notice that either she or LaCroix had entered the room.

LaCroix said his name three times before he lifted his head, not to look at either of them, but just to stare directly ahead of him.

LaCroix's fingertips brushed against the wavy blond hair - longer now than Natalie had ever seen it.

"It is as if he does not see or hear or think," LaCroix said softly. "I don't know how to reach him."

Natalie knelt beside Nick, ignoring the pain that shot up from her knee as she did so.

"Nick? Can you hear me?"

He blinked, and for a moment there was a distant look in his eyes, but then he bent forward again and went back to his painting.

Natalie had to ask LaCroix, "How do you know that he's still a vampire?" <He's not even acting human.>

LaCroix smiled indulgently. "I feel the vampire in him. Very weak, like Vachon, but it is there. He still has certain instincts. He knew without being told that there were other vampires here this evening, and something inside of him was attracted to their presence. Ordinarily he does not leave this room without being coerced. And, of course, he still drinks blood."

"Have you tried anything else?" She tried not make that an accusation.

"Dr. Lambert, you are grasping at the proverbial straws. As I told you, he is not mortal. But yes, in desperation, I admit that I have. It is difficult to get him to feed, as you can see." He ran his hand over Nick's shoulders, where the bones were most prominent. "He has no interest in his own well-being, I'm afraid."

The clothes Nick wore were simple - a T-shirt and jogging pants -but they were clean and so was Nick. His hair was longer, but it wasn't dirty or tangled. If he wasn't taking care of himself, someone was doing a meticulous job of it for him. Was it LaCroix? It had to be.

She noticed how the old vampire looked at Nick and began to see him in a different light. What was it in his eyes she saw? Sorrow? Affection? Regret?

She turned her attention back to Nick. She tentatively reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. She could feel the joint where once there had been strong, powerful muscle.

He flinched at her touch, but didn't pull away immediately. Instead, he closed his eyes as if he were trying to see something hidden deep in his mind. Did he remember her? Her touch, her scent?

But just when she thought maybe he did, he pulled away with a vicious jerk.

When she tried to touch him again, he shielded his face as if expecting a blow.

"Enough!" LaCroix said softly, but sternly. He knelt beside Nick and put an arm across his shoulders. "It's all right Nicholas. We will go now."

That seemed to calm him instantly.

Even so, Natalie found it hard to believe that the Nick she knew wanted to be so completely alone.

"May I come back and see you again, Nick?" she asked him, as if she were speaking to a complete stranger, because in fact, she was.

Nick continued to look down at his painting, but after several seconds Natalie thought she saw a barely perceptible nod.

She looked at LaCroix. He'd seen it, too.

"Later, then, okay Nick?"

This time, there was no response.

LaCroix stood up and helped her off the floor. Natalie tried to walk ahead of him. She was afraid she was going to cry, and she didn't want him to see it.

But he caught up to her easily, and took her arm in his. "I know," he whispered to her. "Seeing him that way is... difficult."

She had put the pain in her knee out of her mind, but when LaCroix drew her attention back to it, she was grateful for the diversion.

"I had a spa installed. I thought Nicholas and my occasional guests might enjoy it. The hot water might be beneficial..."

To Natalie, it sounded great, but then she remembered that she was one mortal woman apparently alone in the middle of nowhere with 4 vampires, and the only one of them she trusted completely was at that moment sound asleep and no match for the other three, anyway.

"Thank you," she said sincerely, "but what I really need is to get back to my car. I have some pills I can take..."

"I'm afraid that is out of the question, Doctor."

Was he saying she would not be allowed to leave? "Why?"

"The vehicle was towed away late this afternoon. I'm afraid the local constabulary grew suspicious when no one returned for it."

"Damn it!" Natalie cursed. "My purse was in there... Oh my God, so was Vachon's food..." She hoped Vachon had his ID on him. He didn't need to be dead yet again...

LaCroix was no help at all. "I fear that foul play will be suspected."

Natalie's heart raced. She really didn't know LaCroix and she had just met the Inca. Nick and Vachon would be no help to her. Just how much trouble was she in?


	19. Chapter 19

"But I have to get back to Albuquerque," she protested, and largely that was true. If nothing else, she had to get Vachon's prescription replaced, and she told LaCroix this.

"Vampires do not require medication," he said, more condescendingly that she had patience for.

"I'm a doctor. I'm a better judge of that than you are."

He turned her to face him. "Dr. Lambert, please calm down. Your heartbeat threatens to deafen me. I am not going to hurt you, and neither will anyone else here. I am just trying to tell you that it is out of the question. There is simply no way for you to get there at the moment."

This was true. There was no reason for her to assume the Inca was in the business of transporting mortals, and it was more than a hundred miles, anyway.

Like it or not, she was stuck there for now.

She stepped away from him and her knee almost buckled. LaCroix caught her before she fell.

"I will have arrangements made if you wish to leave."

What she said next surprised her. "No. I don't want to leave."

LaCroix raised an eyebrow. "You are sure?"

"I need more time with Nick. I can't accept that he's insane. It's something else. I just need to find out what it is."

"Of course you are welcome, Dr. Lambert, but..."

"Vachon, too. He'll be safe here. I had no idea how susceptible he was to becoming ill. I don't even know what he's picked up, but it took only a brief contact with mortals to do it. He needs to be isolated until he's stronger."

"He may stay - if that is his wish. I will not force him."

"And I really do need to get his medication replaced..."

LaCroix put up a hand to silence her. "Write down everything you require to work here. I will ensure the necessary provisions."

"Work? You mean research?"

"If it means helping Nicholas, yes." He could see Natalie didn't understand this turn of events, so he explained. "Dr. Lambert, it is no secret to you that I have wealth. I even enjoy a certain degree of power in select circles. If we were mortal, I would have had Nicholas to a dozen specialists by now, but you and I both know that simply is not possible."

"LaCroix, I'm not sure how much I can do. I haven't been that much help to Vachon."

"You think not? What would he have done had you not been there? All I am asking is that you be here for Nicholas, too."

Natalie looked back at the room they had just left, at Nick, alone someplace that neither of them could reach. She couldn't leave him wherever that was. If there was a way to bring him back, she had to try to find it.

She spent the next few hours making a list of laboratory supplies she might need as well as every drug she could think of that was, or might be, effectively used on a vampire. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. She wished she'd brought copies of her notes along.

She also wrote a personal letter to Grace. No telling what questions were going to be asked in Toronto when the New Mexico police failed to find her, and when they discovered that the neatly packaged blood in the Coleman cooler was human. She didn't want to tell her friend any more lies, so she kept the letter as brief as possible. She did tell her the one thing that she hoped would keep Grace from going to the authorities when she received the letter. She told her she had found Nick Knight.

\+ + + + + + +

After a restful night's sleep in Janette's bedroom, during which her knee ceased its protests for the time being, Natalie borrowed leggings and a tee-shirt from the wardrobe. Not exactly Janette's style, but apparently the elegant vampire did dress casually on occasion, and judging from the labels inside, even those clothes weren't cheap.

The clock on the VCR said 3:17. The vampires were still asleep.

She checked on Vachon, who had been moved to a room with two beds. The Inca was still with him, and Natalie didn't doubt that if it had been anyone but her, he would have been awake in an instant. Vachon had been asleep for almost 20 hours. His breathing was still ragged, but even though he didn't look any better, he didn't seem any worse, either.

She went into the kitchen for a glass of water, and discovered the can opener on the table. LaCroix must have looked for it until he found it. Well, she couldn't fault his hospitality.

She ate another can of spaghetti while sitting in front of the TV. LaCroix had every channel in the known universe, and it took her a couple of hours just to find and surf through them all.

Vachon was the first one to wake up. He drifted into the kitchen in his socks and jeans and leaned against the wall for a moment with his eyes closed. When he opened them again, he seemed bewildered by his surroundings.

Natalie went to him. "Vachon?"

His eyes were still irritated from sun exposure, and he squinted when he looked at her. "Hi. I thought maybe I was dreaming... How did you get here?"

"I came looking for you, and your brother found me."

"He's _not_ my brother."

<Okay, touchy subject...> "The Inca, then. He brought me here. We're stuck here for now. The police towed the car when I didn't get back to it."

"Is Nick here? I remember feeling him, I think..."

Vachon seemed more disoriented that the situation warranted.

"He's here. You were right... Are you okay?"

He nodded, but started coughing, a deep, wracking cough. The steel arrow hadn't punctured his lung, but whatever bug he had picked up had invaded his respiratory system.

"Come and sit down," Natalie told him.

"I'm alright."

"You're sick."

"That's not news, Natalie." He eased himself carefully into one of the kitchen chairs, guarding the wound on his side.

Natalie tried to move his hand to examine it, but he pulled away. "Leave me alone."

"Well, we're in a crabby mood this evening." She tried to make light of it, but it did surprise her. She had seen him depressed, but usually he wasn't hostile.

The bottles in the refrigerator all looked alike to her, so she grabbed the nearest one and hoped she wasn't pouring Vachon something that LaCroix didn't want to share. She handed a mugful of it to him after warming it.

He drank it slowly, but finished it and pushed the empty mug towards her for a refill.

When she put it back down in front of him, he remained perfectly still, his eyes half-closed, completely unaware of her presence.

"Vachon?" She nudged him gently and got no response. "Vachon!"

Her shouting startled him, but it took him a few moments to come back to full consciousness.

He knew what had happened. "I guess now we know the drug was working." He reached for his mug and drank. "Did you bring it?"

She told him what had happened to the Dilantin.

As he always did, he calmly accepted this piece of unwanted news, but when LaCroix emerged from behind the locked steel door and fixed a disapproving stare on the younger vampire, Vachon stared straight back at him defiantly.

"What?" he said finally.

LaCroix's eyebrows lifted as he eyed Vachon's bare chest and dirty jeans. "I see I must arrange for a more... extensive... wardrobe for you."

"That's not a bad idea, LaCroix. Especially since my shirt has a big, bloody hole in it thanks to you." He pushed himself away from the table and got up to leave, but had to steady himself against the back of the chair.

Natalie saw the blank expression return to his face. Alarmed, she realized that this was the second, possibly third seizure she'd witnessed in less than 15 minutes.

She supported him so he wouldn't fall until he came out of it. When he did, he pushed away from her and staggered into the living room as if he was drunk. There were two steps leading down into the sunken living room, and nothing for him to hold on to. She held her breath as he barely managed to negotiate them without falling. Nevertheless, he sat down in front of the TV as if absolutely nothing were wrong.

Natalie turned to the other vampire. "LaCroix, he's in trouble. I told you that prescription had to be replaced."

"It's being taken care of," he assured her, and did not seem overly concerned. He was heating more blood in two mugs when Nick appeared.

For the briefest moment, she made eye contact with him before his attention was diverted to Vachon. He did not react to Vachon's presence in any particular way, but clearly, he noticed that he was there.

LaCroix seemed to find this unusual. He sounded almost excited when he approached Nick, but his voice remained calm, soothing. "It's Vachon, Nicholas. He's alive."

There was no surprise, no joy, no indication that Nick even cared Vachon wasn't dead, but he did keep staring at him, and Natalie noted that for an brief time, there was something behind those dead eyes.

What did he remember?

Vachon turned around and their eyes met. Neither vampire said a word to the other, but Natalie had the strangest sensation that _something_ passed between them. Finally, Vachon said, "Hello, Nick."

Nick said nothing, but a slight nod of his head acknowledged Vachon's greeting.

LaCroix noted the exchange with more than mild interest, but didn't comment on it. He guided Nick to the table and handed him his mug.

Natalie looked at it suspiciously. "Human?" she asked LaCroix.

"Yes, Dr. Lambert," LaCroix's voice offered no apologies. "It is his natural food."

Natural food or no, Nick seemed to want no part of it. He only drank a few sips because LaCroix intimidated him into it by raising his voice and telling him he'd force it into him if he didn't drink it.

He was the old LaCroix at that point - domineering and insistent. Nick was defenseless against the verbal assault and probably would be against a physical one as well.

Natalie didn't like the way LaCroix handled the situation and told him so. "Is this what you do? Bully him? Or is this show for my benefit?"

LaCroix's eyes were still hard when he looked at her. "I assure you, Dr. Lambert, it is not a... _show_ , as you put it. I have had to force feed him at times. It's a most trying experience, and a rather messy one. It is not something you want to witness, I assure you." He punctuated his comments by shoving Nick's mug at him again. "Finish it!" he commanded.

Vachon didn't turn around, but said, "It gets worse if he feeds."

"What?" Natalie turned to him.

"The blood... makes it worse..."

"Vachon, what are you talking about?"

The younger vampire buried his face in his hands. "I don't know... I..."

His body shook suddenly as if he was shivering, but if anything, the room was too warm. He leaned over until he was lying down on the couch.

He whispered Natalie's name.

Before she reached him, Amaru appeared from out of nowhere and was also at Vachon's side when Natalie knelt beside him. He looked questioningly at Natalie as Vachon's eyes glazed over and his body trembled.

The convulsions rapidly increased in intensity and it was soon apparent to Natalie that these were not the mild tonic spasms and lapses of consciousness he'd had in the past. He was having a full- blown grand mal seizure.

Amaru crouched beside Natalie. "What can I do?"

She shook her head. "Nothing. It just has to run its course."

LaCroix's attention was diverted away from Nick. She could read nothing in the expression on his face as they waited for the seizure to stop.

When it did, Vachon had no pulse, which was not surprising, but he wasn't breathing, either. Vampires didn't need a steady supply of oxygen to stay alive, but they did need it to remain conscious. Natalie checked Vachon's eyes. The pupils were dilated. He looked dead.

"LaCroix..." she said, alarmed. "...is he alive? Can you tell?"

"He is alive," the Inca answered for him, but he, too, was uneasy.

It caught them all off-guard when Nick joined them.

He said nothing, his face betrayed no emotion, but from that buried place in his mind, somehow a tiny spark of Nick Knight the cop managed to emerge. Astonished (and a bit embarrassed that she hadn't thought of it herself) Natalie watched as he bent over Vachon and without missing a beat began to perform textbook perfect CPR on the unconscious vampire...

Of course, with a heart that beat only 6 or 7 times an hour, there was no way to tell if the "C" part was even necessary, but Vachon did start to breathe again, and became particularly animated when he woke up with Nick's mouth covering his.

"Hey, I'm okay!" He pushed Nick away, with a horrified look on his face that would have made Natalie laugh under other circumstances.

Nick backed off, his face still devoid of expression, but for a brief moment, Natalie thought, _her_ Nick had been there. Somehow, somewhere, he still _was_ , and damn it, she was going to find him and bring him back.


	20. Chapter 20

Natalie estimated that LaCroix got Nick to drink about 24 ounces before he let him go, about the same amount that Vachon had consumed. By comparison, LaCroix and the Inca each consumed 8 or 9 times that much. Vachon would probably come back for more later. He usually did, and often consumed a normal quantity of blood over the course of the night. But if this small amount was all Nick was eating, it wasn't any wonder he looked like he was starving.

Amaru powered up LaCroix's computer and found the game pack. Vachon's curiosity quickly drew him to the machine as well.

Natalie watched them together for awhile. They were exactly the same size, same build, same dark hair and eyes. She wondered if their master's choice had been a deliberate one. She noticed that although they didn't look alike, they shared many of the same mannerisms and facial expressions. How much of that came from the bloodlink they shared? Had some of this been passed down from their master along with the genetic aberration that had made them what they were? Or had it come from the fact that each was brought across with the blood of the other?

She made a mental note to jot down her observations and then left to look in on Nick. She found him exactly as she had left him the night before, sitting on the floor bent over his red-painted canvas, meticulously applying more red paint in tiny strokes.

She approached him slowly. She didn't want to spook him.

"Can I see what you're painting, Nick?"

There was no reaction one way or the other when she sat down beside him and studied his work. His face was so close to it that she had difficulty making out what he was painting at first, but slowly the image became apparent; A battlefield littered with dismembered corpses. It was repulsive and horrifying, but she kept her comment calm and non-judgmental.

"That's very interesting. It must be very difficult to get the right shadings and textures with just one color."

He stopped for a moment as if considering this, and then went back to work, dabbing paint in tiny circular strokes, each one studied at close range.

A sudden thought struck Natalie like a lightning bolt.

Nick was physically _much too close_ to what he was doing.

His vampire vision should have allowed him to see and accurately place those brush strokes an arm's length away.

She remembered when Vachon couldn't see well enough to read. His vision still hadn't come back a hundred percent.

"It's worse when he feeds," Vachon had said when Nick was refusing the blood. Why had he said that? How did he know?

And, of course, the answer was obvious. The one thing Vachon and Nick had in common was that they had both survived being attacked by Divia.

Nick thought he had escaped unscathed. But what if he hadn't? What if the incident in the loft just days later - either the emotional impact of thinking he'd killed her, or the actual physical impact of the blow struck by LaCroix - had weakened him just enough that Divia's poison had finally been able to overwhelm him?

There could have been any number of reasons why the effect was not as dramatic in Nick as it had been in Vachon. Nick was older and stronger for one thing, and he was physically larger than Vachon, or at least, he had been at the time they were attacked. For another, Vachon's blood had not been subjected to the experimentation and tampering that might have ironically made Nick less susceptible. Also, Nick was related to Divia--he was her vampire "grandson." Maybe her poison could not work its full evil on him because he had somhow inherited from her a resistance to it. Or, perhaps she had simply chosen not to completely destroy a consanguineous vampire.

Another thought occurred to her. Vachon's vampire abilities had been severely impaired by what Divia had done to him. LaCroix had said it himself, "I can barely feel him." And what had the Enforcer said? "...practically mortal."

Vachon hadn't tried to make a vampire in that condition, but what if he had? What kind of fledgling would the act have begotten? What if the vampire element in his blood had become so diluted, _it wouldn't work_?

Could that be the reason why she hadn't come across when LaCroix had given her Nick's blood?! Had Nick's blood been just powerful enough to heal her over a period of days, yet not potent enough to effect the transformation of her cells into those of a vampire?!

And why wasn't she poisoned as well?

Her mind was racing again. There were a million things that had to be done. Samples to be taken, tests to run... And, first, she'd have to run the idea by LaCroix. The old vampire would be able to tell her if what she was thinking wasn't possible. She didn't think he'd tell her it wasn't if that was not the truth. She'd seen the way he looked at Nick. In his own way, he wanted him back every bit as much as she did.

She returned to the living room where LaCroix was calmly reading, and Vachon and Amaru were arguing in over something that had to do with the game on the screen. Whatever language they were using, it wasn't one Natalie had ever heard.

Vachon was clearly the more excitable of the two, but the Inca wasn't backing down. The funny thing about Amaru was that while he was apparently willing to do what was necessary to ensure Vachon's safety, he didn't seem to particularly _like_ him at all.

LaCroix put his book down when she sat beside him. He nodded in Vachon's direction.

"He has difficulty staying with the game."

"It's because of the seizures. He's probably losing consciousness even when he doesn't look like it." Abruptly discontinuing the Dilantin had caused the attacks to return more severely than before, just as she had feared. "Is that what they're fighting about?"

"No," LaCroix smiled indulgently. "I believe it is a disagreement concerning tactics..."

"What language is that?"

A raised eyebrow. "Well, it appears to be roughly seven or eight dialects of Spanish, Quechua, some French and a couple of very dead languages thrown in. I do not doubt that they are the only ones who understand it."

Natalie would have loved to have known how that particular oddity evolved, but there were more pressing matters at hand.

"You have something you wish to tell me Dr. Lambert?"

Now, how did the old devil know that?

"Yes. I've noticed certain similarities between Nick and Vachon. I think they may have to do with the fact that they were both attacked by Divia."

She saw that he was interested, and he calmly bade her continue. She outlined her theory for him.

"Is it possible?"

He appeared to mull it over and finally said, "Such conjecture is not without its merits."

"The problem is, I'm going to have to run preliminary laboratory analyses, so I'll need equipment..."

"Everything you've asked for will be procured, I assure you."

"And I'll need to run tests and take samples. Some of it won't be too pleasant for Nick. I don't know how he'll react."

"Nor do I," LaCroix said honestly.

"Also... I will need a healthy vampire for my control."

"That will not be a problem." LaCroix didn't bat an eye. "I'm sure that Amaru will... volunteer."

Natalie got the idea that the young vampire wouldn't be given a choice. The look on her face must have conveyed her disapproval to LaCroix.

He explained. "I would gladly offer myself for that purpose, but I, too, was attacked by Divia. If I am correct, that would make me unsuitable as a control."

Natalie's shoulders slumped. "It would also shoot a hole in my theory."

"Not necessarily."

"But you aren't sick."

He gave her a wry smile. "I am also almost two thousand years old, Dr. Lambert. And, Divia _was_ my master. It is possible these things afforded me a certain degree of immunity that Nick and Vachon did not enjoy. Also, Nicholas killed her before she finished the job."

"You're right, though. Even if you weren't affected, the exposure renders you inappropriate as a control subject."

Vachon and Amaru had stopped arguing. They were playing Tetris from a keypad, a feat which Natalie had found to be only one step above impossible, since she didn't possess the Inca's lightning reflexes. Vachon didn't have the manual dexterity to work the keys, but he seemed to be deciding the placement of the pieces.

When she looked over their shoulder, she saw they'd already attained a phenomenally high score with Vachon issuing one word commands that made no sense to her but which Amaru seemed to understand perfectly.

She expected them to beat the game, but they didn't, and that made Vachon angry.

Natalie put her hands on his shoulders to calm him down. "It's just a game, Vachon."

"I know," he sighed. "But it was easy... before."

She gently pulled his hair back out of his face. "Yeah. I know."

"Enough of this," Amaru decided for them both. He turned the computer off. "You should feed," he told Vachon.

Natalie agreed. When she had Vachon alone in the kitchen, she asked him about what had happened earlier.

"You said Nick was worse when he feeds. Explain that to me."

"I was just babbling."

"No, you weren't. Now tell me."

He stared at his mug, searching for words. "I'm not sure I can explain it... Can you tell me something, Natalie? Nick was attacked by Divia, too, wasn't he?"

Natalie's mind backtracked and she realized that there was no way Vachon could have known that. He had already 'died' when Divia had sought Nick out.

"Yes! Yes he was..." Natalie said excitedly. "What made you think that, Vachon?"

"Nick and I are linked somehow. I felt it when he walked in the room. It was more than just the sense of another vampire. I think I could have known his thoughts if I'd tried... I did know what he was feeling when LaCroix tried to make him eat. Remember the first few days, after I... woke up?"

"Yes."

"I was hungry, but the blood made me hurt inside. Not just physical pain, but the hallucinations, too."

"Yes, of course I remember..." Natalie was beginning to see a picture emerge

"Nick's the same way, only instead of visions he..." Vachon leaned his head on his hands. "I'm not sure I'm explaining this right, but he's disconnected somehow. It's like he's dreaming, but he's awake. That's what I felt from him. The blood causes the physical pain, too, but worse than that it makes him feel like he's... nowhere." He shook his head. "I'm not making sense."

"Yes, you are, Vachon. More than you know. But this 'link' between you, what do you think it is?"

"Do you really want to know what I think?"

"Yes, and it's important."

"I think Divia somehow left a part of herself in both of us. I think that in some way, we're linked through her."


	21. Chapter 21

Vachon would be of no further help to her. Two hours before dawn, he lapsed into a coma after a particularly brutal seizure that had lasted several minutes. Natalie had known the potential for something like that existed once the Dilantin had been withdrawn so abruptly, but she had hoped it wouldn't happen. Whether it was a lack of oxygen, a hemorrhage, or his vampire physiology reacting to the rampant electrical discharge, without sophisticated diagnostic equipment, there was no way for her to determine exactly what had caused his brain to shut down. Maybe his body had simply just given up. She could do nothing to help him.

Nick had somehow known when it happened. He had left his work and stood by with a puzzled look on his face as Natalie tried in vain to elicit some sort of response out of Vachon. The only thing that seemed to get any reaction at all was intentionally inflicting pain, so after a few attempts, she quite trying.

Nick seemed confused and frightened by this unexpected turn of events, but so did Amaru, and even LaCroix, in his own indirect way.

Natalie wished she could have been of some comfort, but that wasn't possible. This was a dangerous complication, and she couldn't pretend that it wasn't serious.

LaCroix assured her that the medication she had requested was on its way, but she had to tell him that the only effect it would have at that point would be to protect him from further injury, not to reverse whatever damage had already occurred.

Despite her certainty that even LaCroix could not get things done so quickly, Natalie was amazed when a full laboratory of equipment arrived just before dawn. How had he managed to gather that much together in just 24 hours? It wasn't everything she'd need, but it was enough to start.

Natalie was with Vachon when it arrived, so she didn't see how it got there. She heard no plane or helicopter, but she had no idea how far beneath the surface Vachon's room was, either. She doubted any kind of vehicle could have made it over the hellish terrain, and there was too much for even several vampires to have carried it.

Along with the equipment were clothing, groceries for her, and some of the drugs she'd requested, including the Dilantin.

She immediately unpacked a syringe and prepared it with a carefully measured dose of the drug.

Amaru watched her inject it directly into Vachon's stomach along with a full unit of blood.

"He wants to wake up," he told her. "He is trying to, but he cannot."

"I know," Natalie said. "All we can do right now is try to make him comfortable."

"LaCroix said there would be things you would need to do to me."

"Some medical tests, yes. Some of them might be painful."

"And this will help you cure Vachon, and Nicholas?"

Natalie was honest with him. "I hope it will, but I don't know that for sure."

She realized this was a touchy situation. If the Inca didn't want to cooperate, there was no way for her to force him, but she also had no doubt that LaCroix would, and she'd have no choice but to be a party to it.

Luckily, he made it easy for her.

He smiled. "Again, we will do what is necessary."

Over the next two days, she gathered skin, hair, blood and tissue samples from her three subjects. Oddly, she found she didn't have to sedate Nick for most of the procedures as she had thought she would. He did not find them pleasant and more than once bared his fangs at her, but he still submitted to them willingly.

Did he remember her poking and prodding him from before, and know instinctively that even if she hurt him, she was not trying to harm him? It almost seemed that way.

Nonetheless, LaCroix insisted on being present, and she wasn't altogether in disagreement with that. Even comatose, Vachon had reacted to pain by trying to bite her a couple of times, so she couldn't trust Nick completely.

She ran what tests she could on the samples and then had LaCroix arrange for the others to be performed by Grace. Natalie trusted her friend to conduct only those analyses she specifically asked for, and to keep her confidence about any untoward results she obtained. Natalie knew that if Grace looked at the samples under a microscope, they would look odd and unfamiliar, so she told her to expect that. Grace was a practical woman, and the idea that the blood came from vampires would never enter her mind. However, just to be on the safe side, Natalie had her conduct specific tests on the samples that would not involve her having to actually determine what species they came from. She wanted a DNA analysis, toxicological screenings and an immunological report. If Grace found something weird and questioned it, Natalie could chalk it up to "the condition" Nick suffered from, which was not a lie <for once>.

Nick had once explained to her that vampires had only one body fluid: blood. But she had found that was not entirely the truth. Their saliva was completely unique in chemical structure, and while one of its components was blood plasma, that was not all that it was. And though she had never mentioned it to Vachon, the scientist in her simply had not been able to pass up the opportunity to analyze a semen sample after she had had intercourse with him. She had discovered that while it consisted primarily of blood and looked like it, it, too, contained other unique components - including what had to be sperm.

Knowing these things, she concluded that she would also need to draw samples of bone marrow and spinal fluid, or whatever their vampire equivalent was. The marrow might tell her what was happening to Vachon's immune system. Despite the coma, his body seemed to be putting up a fight against the infection he'd contracted. He was sick, but it wasn't overpowering him.

Perhaps analyzing the spinal fluid from Nick and Vachon would reveal what it was that had wreaked such havoc with their nervous systems.

She was also looking for anything that might provide some insight into why she did not come across when LaCroix had given her Nick's blood.

Amaru refused sedation for the procedures, even though Natalie warned him that there could be considerable discomfort involved. He stoically endured the withdrawal of the bone marrow, but she had not done a lumbar puncture on a live patient since her internship, and the dura mater covering his spinal cord was as tough as shoe leather. She had to do a lot of twisting, pushing and rotating to penetrate it. It had to have been extremely painful, and sensing that, LaCroix had stood by ready to restrain him if it became necessary. Luckily, it didn't, but both vampires were clearly relieved when it was over.

She sedated Nick and Vachon when she took fluid samples from them, but was surprised when her needle met with only slightly above normal resistance when she performed the procedure on Nick, and none at all when she did it to Vachon. The Enforcer's words came back to her again, "...practically mortal."

The spinal fluid, like their saliva, did not look like blood at all, although it was an abnormal pink color. She was excited to discover that the samples from Nick and Vachon contained numerous white blood cells, but Amaru's contained none. She wondered what Grace would conclude from studying it.

LaCroix arranged for the samples to be delivered into Grace's hands along with Natalie' specific directions for their analysis.

There was nothing to do then but wait.

Nick finished the red painting and started on a white one, a barren arctic landscape, cold and forbidding.

He permitted her to sit beside him while he worked, even though he did not speak to her or otherwise acknowledge her presence.

"You're really big on the gloom and doom these days, aren't you Nick?" she said as he put the finishing touches on the frozen skeleton of some sea mammal.

He stopped painting and held perfectly still, staring at the painting as if seeing something in it for the first time.

Natalie's first instinct was to retract the statement, but then she saw that he actually appeared to be considering her criticism for a brief instant.

Still, she thought some damage control was in order. "You do have a very graphic imagination. And, I can't say your work isn't totally original, because I've never seen anything like it."

That seemed to please him. He dipped his brush and went back to painting the bare bones.

She only stayed with him awhile. She had been working 20 hours a day for the past few days, so she was exhausted, and Nick's condition was an emotional drain on her.

She was thinking of turning in as she neared Vachon's room and heard LaCroix speaking in his resonant Nightcrawler voice. She didn't think it was a conversation, not only because Vachon was quite unable to speak, but because the tone was too formal. Was he playing old Nightcrawler tapes? Trying to recapture the Glory Days, as it were?

But to her surprise, when she reached Vachon's room, she found LaCroix sitting in a chair, reading aloud. Vachon's eyes were open, looking at the old vampire. Natalie had no idea if he could actually see or not, or if he understood any of it. Perhaps he only found the sound of Lacroix's soft, melodic voice soothing, but some part of him was listening.

She sat down on Vachon's bed and listened, too. LaCroix was reading Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land." His dry wit caused her to chuckle a couple of times as he recited the Martian-born character's impressions of Earth.

Eventually, he reached the end of a chapter and closed the book.

"I have heard that sometimes this type of stimulation is helpful in... a case like Vachon's," he explained, holding up the book. "Amaru told me he liked this story, and I happened to have a copy..." He seemed to want to excuse his behavior. <Doesn't want anyone to know he cares.>

"I think he was listening," Natalie said, fingering Vachon's hair.

Both of them were silent. Natalie knew it was because they were thinking the same thing.

A human in Vachon's condition would quite possibly develop complications that would quickly prove fatal. Natalie doubted that would happen to Vachon, and even if it did, it would likely not kill him. If they didn't feed him, he would starve, but he wouldn't die. Unless he was staked, or left in the sun, he could remain in that state literally forever.

LaCroix got up to leave and as he did, he put a hand on her shoulder. "I think it is a bit premature to abandon all hope," he said. "He has endured more than any vampire I know of, and still, he wants to live. I can feel that. His will is strong. I just wish Nicholas..." his voice trailed off. "Get some rest, doctor. You are fatigued."

When he was gone, she allowed that he was right about giving up hope. They still had not heard from Grace, and it was possible she had found something - anything - in the samples that would allow her to perform a miracle and make Nick and Vachon whole again.

But the question of what she would do if the day came when there was no more hope still nagged at her. LaCroix would not allow Vachon to go on like this, not because he was cruel, but because he wasn't. And what alternatives could she offer, anyway?

She picked up Vachon's pale, cold hand and held it to her cheek. "I'm not going to let you go without a fight," she promised him, and she would keep that promise until it was a certainty that keeping him alive would be less merciful than ending his suffering permanently. They weren't at that point yet.

She squeezed her eyes shut to keep the tears from falling, but one escaped anyway, and it was as if a dam had burst. Her weariness, her uncertainty about Nick, her fears for Vachon, all came pouring out, and in that moment, she knew that nothing in her life mattered with out Them, without these vampires.

What that made her, she didn't know, nor did she care. She remembered what the Enforcer had told her, "You are capable of loving us."

And she did love them. Ruthless, murdering, perfect predators that they were, she still loved them.

<Please don't leave me, Vachon. Please, oh please, come back to me Nick!>

Her misery was interrupted by a cool hand on her shoulder.

Damn, she didn't want LaCroix to see her crying.

But when she turned around, it wasn't LaCroix.

It was Nick.

He sat beside her on the bed, and awkwardly, wordlessly, took her in his arms. His intentions were unreadable. It was as if he knew this was something he was supposed to do, even though he didn't remember why and seemed not to completely remember how.

He touched her hair and then wiped a tear from her cheek. For a fleeting instant, there was some emotion in his eyes. It vanished too quickly for her to be certain what it was - concern? confusion? love?

But he was holding her, and it felt so good to be in his arms again. It made no difference to her at all what he was, and she wondered how she could have ever been so foolish as to have let it matter.

This was a vampire. _Her_ vampire. She loved him, no matter what, and she always would.


	22. Chapter 22

Natalie was asleep when Grace called, and was completely disoriented when LaCroix woke her up, handed her the cordless phone, and abruptly left. She hadn't heard it ring and didn't even know where he kept it. Add that to the surprise of waking up with LaCroix standing over her (she had locked the door), and it took her a few moments to connect with what Grace was telling her. The woman was apologizing profusely for something.

"Grace, Grace... slow down. I'm half asleep. What are you talking about?"

Grace told her. The New Mexico State Police had run a check on her with the Toronto PD after they had picked up her abandoned car and failed to find a trace of her in the surrounding area. She was surprised to learn they had searched the Malpais from the air for two days in an attempt to find her.

The Toronto Police had asked her coworkers where she had planned to go, or who she might have visited. The investigating officers knew full well who she was, and treated the case as if it involved one of their own. They had been thorough. A check of the airline's records had revealed she had been assigned a seat on two different flights next to one Javier D. Vachon who, it turned out, had somehow managed to obtain an Ontario driver's license without any documentation.

"What? How did they know to connect me to him?"

Dead silence.

"Grace?"

"Natalie, I was worried, and they asked me and..."

"What did you tell them?"

"About that guy you had living with you. I told them what he looked like, and he matched the description of this Vachon guy."

Natalie sighed, but she was sure LaCroix could take care of any complications that might arise from this, so she told Grace, "Don't worry about it. Vachon's not anyone dangerous. What else?"

"What were you doing with a picnic cooler filled with human blood, Natalie? They wanted to know that, too."

"What did you tell them?"

"I didn't tell them anything because by the time they asked about it, I'd already gotten your letter. How did you get that to me so quickly? It got here the same day you dated it. What did you do, send it by supersonic carrier pigeon? <Close enough.>

"What the hell is going on, Natalie? Why on earth did you leave your car in the middle of nowhere? Who is this Vachon guy? And what were you doing with that blood?"

"It's my research, Grace. You know I use large samples of blood for that." Natalie tried to ignore the other questions.

"Well, who is this guy you're with?"

"He's Nick's cousin. You met him."

"I thought his name was Xavier?"

"Yeah, well, it's uh, the same guy... Have you had a chance to analyze those samples?" she changed the subject.

She had labeled the samples only with the vampires' initials, A, V and K, but Grace was smart enough to figure out the V and K, now that she knew Nick's "cousin" was named Vachon.

"Who is sample A from?" she wanted to know.

Again, Natalie did her best to be evasive. "Why? Did you find something unusual?"

"Are you sitting down? This might take awhile."

"I'm still in bed Grace. Run it past me."

Grace had discovered a number of relatively trivial things which Natalie had expected. The abnormal DNA patterns, certain unique proteins in the blood and tissues, and other anomalies which Natalie casually dismissed as attributable to Nick's genetic disorder.

But Grace had also made an important discovery.

"Understand that you didn't tell me what I was supposed to be looking for," she said accusingly, "so I was pretty much hunting fleas on a black dog..."

"Tell me what you found, Grace."

"Well, the toxicology reports indicate that both the V and K samples have traces of the toxin we found in the earlier samples we took from Xavier. Is Nick sick, Natalie?"

No point in lying to her about that. "Yes, Grace, he is."

"I was afraid of that. I'm sorry to hear it. But, as I was saying, I really didn't know what I was supposed to do with that information, so I did a comparison with what we have on file in the computer. It turned out the same toxins were found in a blood sample taken from a Jane Doe, but I guess no one ever asked for the results on her, probably because of the condition her body was in. The report lists the cause of death as due to massive blood and tissue loss, so the presence of this toxin was probably not what killed her..."

"Grace, wait a minute. What Jane Doe? Do you have the report there?"

"Yes, it just says Jane Doe, age approx 20-25, blond, 5'6"... You signed the thing, and Nick was the investigating officer. The case is closed, but no indication how it was resolved..."

"What's the date?"

Grace read it to her. It was Urs. It had to be. If her blood was poisoned with the same toxin found in Nick's and Vachon's samples, Divia had to be the source.

But to be sure, she asked, "And there was no trace of the toxin in the A sample?"

"No. None. Just the same goofy-looking blood cells that were in all three samples, except there were 20-30 times more of them and they appeared more... well, they just looked healthier. I can't explain it..."

Great. She'd looked under a microscope just like Nat had hoped she wouldn't.

"This thing that Nick has... it causes deformities in the blood cells? Like sickle cell disease?" Grace asked.

Well, now, that was a perfectly good lie, and she didn't even have to make it up herself... "Yes," she jumped in quickly. "The symptoms are different, but basically, yes, the blood cells are affected."

"Well, you might find this interesting. All three spinal fluid samples contained those aberrant blood cells, but the V and K samples also contained a second type of cell, bigger, with a rougher surface. The cell count was roughly the same in all three samples, so it appears these cells had replaced the normal blood cells... or, at least what is normal for this condition."

"Really?"

"Yes, and they had antibodies attached to them, so I thought they might be foreign. If they were, then the source of the original infection might have been Jane Doe. The funny thing is, these cells don't seem to interact with this weird blood of Nick's in the same way it would react with normal blood. In fact, they seem to mostly ignore healthy human blood cells. Something must be different, because Xavier should be dead considering how high his levels were, and if the condition of Nick's blood now is any indication, his levels were once just as high as Xavier's. I analyzed a few of these odd cells separately. I think they are the source of the toxin... or were."

"Were?"

"They appear moribund. The cytoplasm itself is saturated with the stuff, but the cells don't seem to be manufacturing or secreting it any longer. Whatever kept these things alive isn't occurring anymore.

<Whatever kept these things alive...>

"They're tough boogers, though. The antibodies seem ineffective. I imagine they will simply die of old age, although there's no telling when that will be."

"Do you know where they might have come from?" Natalie asked.

Grace took a deep breath, like she didn't want to answer.

"Grace?"

"Well, it behaves like a fungus infection, but the cells are definitely not a fungus. They more closely resemble a mutation of the other type of cell. So, I did a PCR on them as well as on the A, V and K specimens, because that would have told me if a mutation had taken place. But, I guess I screwed up and somehow cross-contaminated the samples."

"Why?"

"The sequencing in the strange cells is close enough to Nick's to prove a blood relationship in court, but they are definitely not Nick's cells. No mutation could have made them that genetically different. Besides, the exact same cells were in the V sample, and they don't match the V sequencing at all. What really convinced me that I screwed up was that most of the sequence patterns in the A and V samples are almost identical. I've never seen results like them. The match is much closer than would be expected of siblings, but there are a few minor exceptions that preclude monozygous twins. I had to have messed up."

"Don't worry about it. I'm not sure it's that important that we identify those cells, anyway, if they are inactive." <Especially since I know all I need to know.>

Grace let her breath out. "I'm glad you said that."

Something had happened. "Why?"

"I don't have the A sample anymore. I didn't safeguard it as a biohazard like I did the others. I didn't see any reason to, since you indicated it was a healthy specimen. I took it home to study it under my own microscope, just out of curiosity..."

"What happened to it?" Natalie's first concern was that it had fallen into the wrong hands. Her second was that Grace had figured out it wasn't human and had tried to identify it.

Here fears were laid to rest by Grace's next remark.

"Natalie, did you know your cat drinks blood?"

\+ + + + + + +

Natalie mentally sorted out what Grace had told her. Divia had somehow introduced her poisonous cells into Nick and Vachon's bodies, probably via a bite or scratch, where they had rapidly multiplied until she was killed, and their link to her lifeforce was disrupted. She realized there was no scientific explanation for the latter, but there were a lot of things about Them that defied explanation, weren't there?

Divia's mortal body was lethal to mortals, and when she was brought across, her venomous blood changed accordingly. Her cells had secreted the toxins that had savaged healthy cells in the vampires' bodies until so few were left intact that they were no longer effectively vampires. Urs could not cope with both the toxic changes in her blood and her ghastly injuries. Her system had been overwhelmed. Still, Natalie had to wonder, if she had treated her as if she had had a chance of recovering, would she have done so?

Vachon and Nick hadn't been ripped apart, and that was why their systems were able to neutralize the toxin enough to enable them to survive. Nick's body had not recognized Divia's cells as completely foreign because he was descended from her, and he had not been attacked as savagely as Vachon had been. That would explain why he had not reacted as violently to the infection as Vachon had. Maybe it was because Nick's body had had time to partially neutralize the toxins, or the fact that Divia was already dead by the time Natalie drank Nick's blood that explained why the poison had not affected her. Another possibility was suggested by Grace's observation that Divia's poison did not appear to actively seek out healthy human tissue -maybe her poison simply was not lethal to humans.

Divia's invasive cells were dying in both vampires. That meant what she was dealing with were residual effects - neurological damage from the poison itself, and immune systems devastated by the battle against Divia's rampaging assault. Natalie suspected that the tissues that produced those aggressive, near-omnipotent vampire antibodies had themselves been damaged, and as long as they did not function properly, the damage would go unrepaired.

The one positive sign was that Vachon's immune system had recovered to some extent. It was strong enough to put up a fight against the mortal infections he had contracted. Once Divia's cells were all dead, he might recover on his own. But how long could that take? What if she were to artificIally boost his immune system? What if she removed as many of Divia's useless cells as possible and replaced them with healthy vampire cells?

Lyllia's blood had resulted in an improvement, so obviously any vampire's blood would help. But what had Vachon told her about the Inca? "The vampires in us are identical..."

Grace had confirmed that Vachon's vampire DNA was almost identical to that of Amaru's. What effect would it have if the vampire blood Vachon was given was virtually his own? Would the regenerative elements be better adapted to rebuilding cells whose genetic make-up they recognized? Any vampire's blood enabled Them to heal quickly, but what if that was only true if what remained of their own cells were still intact?

That had to be true - otherwise, Lyllia's blood would have cured Vachon.

What if, in this case, the blood had to be as near to a perfect match as possible?

There was only one way to find that out, and what Grace had thought were erroneous PCR results had given Natalie not only the question, but the perfect answer to it.


	23. Chapter 23

Natalie showered and dressed and then discovered that, for the first time, she had awakened after the rest of the household.

Someone had already made coffee for her.

She poured a cup and went to check on Vachon. Amaru was with him, the look on his face not exactly one of brotherly concern, but something was bothering him. She had put Vachon on oxygen the night before. The congestion in his lungs had progressed to pneumonia. She had stepped up the antibiotics, even though she still had no idea if they were even working.

She listened to his chest and discovered there was very little air exchange. His heart rate had risen to an alarming 20 beats per minute in a useless effort to supply his comatose brain with oxygen.

He wasn't going to die. They couldn't suffocate. But in a very short time, he was going to stop breathing, and then his heart would stop. He would not be dead, and yet, he would not be alive, either. The situation brought home the meaning of the term "undead."

"He can't clear his lungs because he can't cough," Natalie explained. "If he were in a hospital, there would be more I could do for him, but here..." she shook her head.

"He feels what is happening," Amaru said. "He is afraid."

Natalie put a hand on his shoulder. "So are you, aren't you?"

"I know what he knows, whether I want to or not."

She wouldn't get a better chance than this one.

"Amaru, if you could help him, would you?"

He looked at her as if he were surprised she even had to ask. He made a motion towards his vampire twin. "I would not want this for myself. How can I want it for him?"

The next question: "How much blood can you safely lose?"

That surprised him, too, and he had to think about it. "I don't know what you mean by 'safely'. I could lose all of my blood and recover, I think, but that has never happened to me."

She explained to him what she wanted to do.

"The tests we did, they proved what Vachon told me, that the vampires in you are identical..."

The Inca nodded. "It is more than a bloodlink - we are of the exact same blood."

She thought about skimming over the technical explanation, but didn't, and found that Amaru understood what she was telling him, as did LaCroix, who entered the room as she was speaking.

"If this works," LaCroix asked cautiously, "Would it be of use to Nicholas?"

Natalie hadn't wanted to think about that, but now she had to. "LaCroix, I don't know. Vachon and Amaru are an exact match. This is like a human organ transplant. The closer the donor matches the recipient, the better the chances for success. Vachon's recovery is going to depend on whether my theory is correct, that Amaru's blood will recognize Vachon's body as its own and repair it. Nick hasn't got another vampire as closely related to him as these two are... does he?"

LaCroix shook his head. "No... but..."

He had something he wanted to say. "What is it?" she asked.

"Natalie, did you know he brought Janette back across?"

Natalie's face clouded. "He didn't tell me that, but I suspected."

"Janette was mine as Nicholas is mine. But she now is Nicholas' creation, also... I have not encountered such a link before, but I suspect it is stronger than the one Nicholas and I share, and the one he shared with her in the past."

Natalie could have kissed the old vampire. It was, she had to admit, a clever observation. "But can you find her? Will she do it?"

"I already know where she is. She _will_ do it." That tone again. The old LaCroix. Janette would be made to do this whether she wanted to or not. Natalie just had to hope she would want to - after she found out if it would even work.

LaCroix warned her before she began that the Vampire Amaru would not tolerate having his blood drained. No matter how much his mortal self desired to participate in the procedure, the vampire would take over and protect both him and itself.

If she drugged him, the drug would be passed to Vachon. He was already so weak that even a small amount would cause instant respiratory and cardiac arrest, and perhaps deepen his coma. They didn't have a choice, though, not really.

She sat down next to Vachon and ran her fingers through his hair, talking to him softly. She explained what they were going to do. He opened his eyes, but she couldn't tell if he understood any of it.

She gathered the supplies she would need, including the two gallons of blood she would give to the Inca to replace what she removed. Once inside his body, it would be converted and become his own, but just to be on the safe side, she had typed it to make certain it was type O negative, the universal donor.

She decided to use the brachial arteries in the upper arm. Lowering the limb over the edge of the bed would be easy, and would allow gravity to drain the blood from both vampires. It would be necessary for her to cut down to the blood vessel, and even though she would use a local anesthetic, she didn't know if it would work, and so could not guarantee that the procedure would be painless. She told Amaru this, but he was not intimidated by the idea of a relatively insignificant wound. <Still the Inca warrior.> It wasn't until she prepared an injection of curare that she saw the first signs that he might be having misgivings about this adventure. He told her he had never been drugged before.

"You may not lose consciousness, but it will paralyze you. You may feel it when I cut into your arm and put the tubes in, too, but you won't be able to move, or perhaps even speak."

He looked at Vachon as if reconsidering his options, but then said, "That little _piojo_ had better remember this."

Natalie administered the injection and waited for the powerful vampire heart beat that would circulate the drug through his system.

When she was satisfied he was immobilized, she worked as quickly as possible to start the actual collection of his blood. Once the blood was flowing freely into the bag, she repeated the process on Vachon, without the curare. She didn't think it was necessary to drug him twice, but LaCroix remained beside him, just in case.

Natalie was touched by how gentle he was with the younger vampire. Something had changed the old demon. Was it seeing what had happened to Nick? He had to blame himself for that. It was because of him that Divia had become the foul creature she had been, a vampire capable of killing with her touch alone. Ironic that she should ultimately turn that power against the one LaCroix cherished above all others.

She wondered how much of what Nick had said about him was the entire truth. She didn't think Nick had lied, but she wondered if he really understood that LaCroix cared for him. True, it was a vampire sort of caring that Natalie did not fully understand, and maybe because Nick did not want to be a vampire, he did not want to understand it, either.

On the other hand, maybe LaCroix had simply learned a lesson from this and was not as mean as he used to be...

Natalie carefully monitored both patients. Amaru's heart was stronger, and that caused him to lose blood more quickly, but his body also kept attempting to reject the tubing, trying to close the wound in his arm. She had to keep the vein open by force. That couldn't have been pleasant.

"You're doing fine," she told him, only because that was a thing that doctors said. He really didn't have the option of doing other than "fine" right then.

Eventually, his heart rate began to pick up and his breathing became rapid and shallow. She explained to him what was happening. "You're going to feel dizzy," she told him. "In a few minutes, you're going to pass out." She smoothed his hair the way she liked to do with Vachon's. "When you wake up, this will be over."

After a few minutes, his eyes closed. She put the stethoscope to his chest and actually heard his heart slow and then completely stop. It was an eerie feeling. She had to fight the urge to panic and start resuscitating him.

It was still several minutes before the blood stopped flowing from both vampires.

Natalie's heart jumped when she looked at the two of them, side by side. By all mortal standards, they were both clinically dead.

She immediately began to transfuse the bottled blood into the Inca, but took the opportunity to try to force some of the fluid out of Vachon's lungs before she gave him his twin's blood. LaCroix had to do most of the work, but he followed her instructions diligently, holding him effortlessly so that his head was lower than his chest while she pounded his back and the sides of his ribcage. They were only moderately successful, but the small improvement was better than none at all. It would give him some breathing space to oxygenate his new blood supply.

Unlike her other experiences transfusing vampires, Vachon's impaired system did not instantly began assimilating the Inca's blood by sucking it in, so she started four lines to get it into him as quickly as possible.

An hour after it began, the transfer was complete. Natalie expected Amaru to wake up immediately, and became concerned when he didn't.

LaCroix reassured her, "He will sleep, but he is fine."

"What about him?" she nodded towards Vachon.

LaCroix shook his head. "I don't know. This is new to me, also."

The older vampire suddenly lifted his head as if he'd been startled.

"What is it?" Natalie asked.

He muttered, "Nicholas," and darted from the room.

Natalie looked at the two unconscious vampires. There was nothing either of them needed at the moment except rest.

She ran after LaCroix.

The scene that greeted her was a nightmare. Nick's studio looked as if he had splattered red paint from one end to another, but it wasn't paint, it was blood, and it was his.

LaCroix was forcibly holding Nick in a headlock, and Nick was screaming -pure rage, utter terror and indescribable pain. It was the most horrifying sound Natalie had ever heard. His fangs were fully extended, and it was only LaCroix's superior strength that was preventing him from ripping either her or LaCroix to shreds, of that she was certain.

She could hear tendons and bones snap as Nick struggled to free himself.

"Vachon's blood..." LaCroix gasped. "Go get it! BURN IT!"

"What?... I..."

"DO IT!"

Natalie ran back to retrieve the bags containing the blood she had taken from Vachon. How the hell was she going to burn it? She thought of the fireplace, but throwing the plastic bags into an open flame could be hazardous to her, assuming she could even get a good fire going...

The microwave oven...

She shoved the bags into it and set the timer for 30 minutes, hoping the glass on the door would hold when the bags exploded.

It didn't take long. After three minutes, the first bag ruptured and the others quickly followed. The inside of the appliance was soon coated with bubbling red liquid and melting plastic.

And Nick was screaming. So loud now that she could hear him as if he were in the same room.

She peered again through the glass oven door and this time was stricken with horror at the sight of the churning mess beyond it.

The part of Divia that had been in Vachon had been forced from its host and now was boiling away, the cells bursting from within as the microwave radiation cooked the life out of them.

And Nick was still linked to it.

\+ + + + + + +

The inside of the microwave was already ruined, so Natalie left it to continue its work of reducing Vachon's blood to a dry powder.

She had to find out what was happening with Nick.

He had stopped screaming by the time she got to him. He was crying, and Natalie wasn't sure which sound was worse. These weren't muffled sobs. He was under Divia's contol, still, and in this moment when Divia faced final destruction, she had reverted to what she had once been in life, however briefly - a human child.

Nick was no longer struggling to get away from LaCroix, but the older vampire continued to hold him close, comforting him, reassuring him. Natalie wondered if those last traces of his mortal daughter connected with him somehow. Had he ever loved Divia? She honestly didn't know. But he did love Nick, she could see that, and in that distant place he was in, she thought Nick saw it now, too.

Both vampires were injured. LaCroix had at least two bloody wounds on his neck and back that were already almost healed. Nick was still bleeding from numerous lacerations. One of his paintings had been ripped from its wooden frame, which had been broken into pieces. A sharp, bloody section of it lay on the blood-stained carpet beside a bloody pair of scissors.

"LaCroix, he's hurt. Let me look at him."

LaCroix shook his head. "Not yet. He's not ready."

"What happened?"

LaCroix closed his eyes and rested his chin on Nick's head as he stroked the pale, long hair.

"I should have known... I didn't think... We killed a part of Divia when we took it from Vachon's body. It was dying, and the part of her in Nick sensed that. He didn't understand, but Divia did. She wanted revenge." He sighed. "She still hates me, even in death. She is still trying to destroy Nicholas, because she knows that _this_ is my child." He drew Nick close to him for a moment. "She knows that I think of her as a monster. I wish I did not, but I do. She wants to kill him, and she wants me dead, also, but these things will not happen. She no longer has form or substance, but she knows this, and her hatred is more intense than anything you can imagine."

Nick had begun to tremble in his arms. "LaCroix, he's going into shock. You have to let me help him."

Nick was quiet by then, just on the brink of consciousness. He moaned in pain as LaCroix removed his shirt.

Even before she got a good look at his injuries, Natalie was horrified. He was so pathetically thin that she could clearly see the outline of his ribcage and collar bones beneath the translucent skin. She had no doubt that he had perforated several organs, and that the stab wounds he had inflicted on himself might have been fatal had he been mortal. There was one especially deep wound just below his sternum. Natalie was afraid to ask the question she suspected, but did anyway.

"He tried to stake himself?"

"I removed it." LaCroix whispered. Natalie noticed that the old vampire didn't look so good himself.

Natalie pressed her ear to Nick's chest and waited for a heartbeat. When one finally happened, she was able to tell LaCroix, "I think he missed his heart."

"It is a miracle then."

He turned Nick over and Natalie saw what he meant. The improvised stake had penetrated so deeply that there was an exit wound on his back.

"He ran at the walls until he drove it all the way through..."

Natalie looked at LaCroix carefully. She honestly thought he might faint on her. "Are you okay?"

He took a deep breath. "Yes... yes, of course. It is just that this is... not a pleasant thing for a vampire to contemplate..."

He looked sadly at Nick, who was once again off in that unknown place.

"He wants to die, Natalie. I can feel that, and I don't know what I can do."

Anyone but LaCroix probably would have dissolved into tears at that point. As it was, the ancient vampire was so visibly shaken that Natalie made a move to comfort him. She put her hand on his shoulder and said, "This is not what our Nick wants. We can help him, and we will."

He reached up and put his hand over hers. A simple gesture, but it said more to her than LaCroix was capable of putting into words.


	24. Chapter 24

Miraculously, Nick did not appear to have done any serious damage with the stake, but his injuries, like Vachon's, would not heal quickly. Aside from the gory stake wound, he had stabbed himself with the scissors. LaCroix had stopped him from cutting his wrists with them, and that was when Nick had stabbed him. LaCroix had broken both of Nick's wrists trying to restrain him.

Natalie sedated him so she could clean and suture the wounds. Without any x-rays to guide her, she had to rely on LaCroix's exquisite sense of touch to tell her when she had properly set the fractures. She did not have what she needed to make casts - broken bones were one possibility she hadn't foreseen - but she was able to devise splints using the unbroken edges of the picture frame and a bedsheet torn into strips.

Nick immediately tried to remove them with his teeth as soon as she was finished.

LaCroix cuffed him sharply on the side of the head to make him stop. After the third time, Nick made the connection and left the splints alone.

Natalie bristled at what she saw as LaCroix's mistreatment, but said nothing. Simply telling Nick not to remove the splints didn't work. She had tried it and so had LaCroix, but the request just didn't sink in.

She also examined LaCroix's injuries, but found that all he needed by that time was a clean shirt.

"He should have something to eat," Natalie said as she cleaned the last traces of blood from Nick's too-thin body.

She helped him sit up, and he winced and put an arm protectively over his chest and abdomen.

"I know the stitches hurt," she told him. "There's nothing I can do about that. Just be careful not to move too quickly."

She spoke as if he would understand her.

He looked at her, directly into her eyes, and for the briefest moment, her Nick was there. She almost expected him to utter one of his playfully sarcastic rebukes of her medical skills, but as if a switch had been thrown, the light quickly went out again.

LaCroix supported him as they made their way to the kitchen at a laborious pace.

Amaru was already there. His keen sense of smell had drawn him to the microwave, and he was peering through the glass door at the mess inside.

"What is this?" he asked no one in particular.

If he shared Vachon's curious nature, his next move would probably be to open the oven door and examine the contents.

"Don't touch it!" Natalie and LaCroix said in unison.

He turned away from it and saw Nick.

"What happened to him?"

"It's a long story," Natalie sighed. "How do you feel?"

"Fine... But I need to feed..."

He stared at her when he said that. He stared _too_ long, and it made her uncomfortable, particularly when she became aware that he was looking at her neck.

LaCroix jerked his arm sharply and shoved a bottle into his hands.

The Inca's predatory stare was instantly replaced with a look of embarrassment. "I'm sorry."

Natalie accepted his apology. She had noticed with Nick that physical stress made the hunger more pronounced. While they had replaced Amaru's blood, some survival mechanism in his body was still on the alert because they had taken it in the first place. She should have anticipated it, and made a note not to be alone with Vachon when he regained consciousness, if he did.

Nick's wrists were too sore to lift the bottle LaCroix put in front of him. Natalie remembered what had worked with Vachon, and snipped a length of surgical tubing to use as a straw. As she had with Vachon, she had to demonstrate what he was supposed to do with it. It often amazed her how some of the most simple aspects of mortal life eluded Them.

The Inca watched curiously as Nick sucked the blood through the tube, and then passed his own bottle to Natalie.

"Put one in here," he ordered.

Natalie was amused by the odd request. Amaru _was_ much like Vachon. This was something new, so he had to try it.

Nick drank without much coaxing. Apparently, the emotional crisis had passed, and the vampire that remained in him also sensed the need to replenish itself with blood.

Natalie let herself relax when LaCroix set a cup of coffee and a small plate of chocolate chip cookies in front of her.

"I hope these are to your liking," he said of the cookies. "I have never experienced such delicacies myself."

Natalie was moved by the gesture. And the cookies were great.

"What about Janette?" she asked as she ate.

"I have sent word that she is needed here. She will need some time to make arrangements, but she will come."

"Tell her to bring another microwave," Amaru said, making a face at the cold, bottled blood.

Natalie finished her snack and checked on Vachon.

He was still feverish and unconscious, but amazing changes had occurred already. Listening to his chest, she found his breathing and heart rate were completely normal. His joints were no longer stiff and sore, and she was able to flex his limbs without causing him any pain. The lesions on his skin -the sunburn and the insect bite - had disappeared, and the wounds in his side and thigh from the steel arrows were almost closed.

She said his name, and he reacted by turning his head towards the sound of her voice. His eyes opened briefly, but he sighed softly and closed them again. However, his level of awareness indicated that he was no longer comatose, he was just asleep. He had slipped out of the coma as mysteriously as he had gone into it.

It was working. Amaru's blood was repairing the damage.

Still, it was too early to hope for too much. Lyllia's blood had had a similar effect, but had not cured him.

She gave him his Dilantin, as it was much too soon to assume he didn't need it. She left him on oxygen. It wouldn't hurt and perhaps it was even helping.

She didn't hear Amaru enter the room, so his voice surprised her.

"He is a tough bastard," he said of Vachon.

"Yes," Natalie had to agree. "He just doesn't give up."

The Inca stretched out on his own bed. Natalie suspected he was still feeling the effects of having his blood taken.

"You don't like him much, do you?" she said, nodding towards Vachon.

His response was quick and blunt. "No."

"Why not?"

He scoffed as if the answer to that were obvious. "Because he is reckless and silly."

"No, he isn't."

"I have known him longer than you have."

"That's true, but I wonder if you really know him at all. Or if he really knows you, for that matter."

Amaru thought that one over for a moment, but then said, "I don't want to know him. The night we were made, he tried to kill me."

"He must not have tried very hard."

"Only because he was too hungry. And then he found out he could fly, and the whole idea left his mind. It didn't even occur to him to make sure I was dead, or that I might come looking for him if I wasn't. All he wanted to do was float in the air, like an idiot."

"Why didn't you kill _him_?"

"I could not think of that then. I needed time to understand what had happened to me, to accept it. He did not. Even now, when we hunt..." He looked at her as if making sure this was something she wanted to hear. "He takes those who will not be missed. I take those who deserve to die."

She thought it best not to comment on why he considered himself competent to make such decisions.

"Don't some vampires just... kill anybody?" she asked instead.

"Yes. Some cannot control the Hunger. He and I... our master gave us that gift, so that we might use it wisely. But that didn't matter to him. He is selfish and ungrateful, too."

<Reckless, silly, an idiot, selfish, and ungrateful... because you can't make him do what _you_ want? >

"But what you did for him tonight... He would have done the same for you."

Amaru looked at her as if this was indisputable. "Of course he would have."

Natalie gave it up. She thought she and Nick had a complicated relationship...

\+ + + + + + +

Nick and LaCroix had returned to Nick's studio. LaCroix was picking up the mess and Nick, amazingly, had resumed his painting as if nothing had happened, although he did appear frustrated that his wrists were immobilized by the cumbersome splints, and probably a fair amount of pain, too. This no doubt hampered his ability to apply the tiny brush strokes needed to define his work.

LaCroix handed her two pieces of wood from a broken picture frame.

"Make a cross," he told her. "Put it on your door before you sleep."

"Why?"

"The Inca almost lost control of himself tonight... If Vachon should wake up, he might be even more dangerous..."

There was more, she knew. "What else?"

"I will keep Nicholas with me as he sleeps. I can no doubt overpower him should it be necessary, but I would still feel better knowing that he will not go near you."

"Why?"

"Because of Divia. Do not doubt that the part of her that still lives in Nicholas wants you dead, too."


	25. Chapter 25

Natalie had tied together the two pieces of wood LaCroix had given her with a length of gauze bandage, and had used the gauze to rig a hanger for the makeshift cross, which she then hung over the doorknob outside her room.

Despite this vampire equivalent of a "Do Not Disturb" sign, she couldn't sleep, knowing that right then, the only vampire she could trust was LaCroix. She was getting over her negative feelings about him, but old habits died hard.

She must have dozed off eventually, because when she heard the sounds of a scuffle coming from down the hall, it took her several seconds to get her bearings.

She cracked the door open and saw Amaru trying to wrestle Vachon to the floor. Obviously, he was now fully conscious, but something was very wrong.

"What is it? What's the matter?" she asked.

The Inca gave her a panicked look. "CLOSE THE DOOR!"

But it was too late.

Vachon flung the Inca off of him and was on her in an instant, his arms pinned to the wall on either side of her preventing her escape. Immediately, she fumbled for the cross and felt her fingers fold around it.

"Vachon! No!" she said sharply. "It's me, Natalie!"

All he had on was a pair of loose-fitting pajama pants that she didn't think belonged to him. There was a lot of exposed skin and the cross would be an effective weapon if she had to use it on him.

His eyes had changed color and his fully-extended fangs were inches from her neck, but his expression told her the vampire was not in complete control, not yet. He was fighting it, but he knew he couldn't win.

His arms were trembling with exertion, and she realized he was trying to push himself away from her.

"Natalie..." he gasped, "make me stop. I can't..."

She shut her eyes because she didn't want to see what happened when she quickly brought the cross up in front of her and shoved it at his face.

He shrieked in rage, but she didn't think she had burned him.

When she opened her eyes again, Amaru had him under control for the moment.

With the cross held out in front of her, all she could do was watch as the Inca dragged his struggling twin back into the bedroom.

With wrenching force, he pulled Vachon into a viciously tight embrace and held him there, but despite the violence of the maneuver, his voice was calm when he spoke to him.

"Drink," he said softly.

Vachon hesitated only an instant before he sank his fangs into Amaru's neck.

Instinct told Natalie that this was something intimate, something she was not supposed to watch, but fascination kept her rooted to the spot. Except for the fangs-on experience with Nick, which she didn't actually remember, she had never seen any of Them feed that way before...

The look the Inca gave her was undeniably hostile.

"Leave us!" he commanded her.

She shut the door and then jumped a foot when she turned around to find LaCroix behind her.

"Are you all right?" he asked

"Yes, but Vachon..."

"He will be fine. Amaru knows what to do."

She followed him into the kitchen, still shaken by the close call and not quite ready to relinquish the cross she still held.

"How is Nick?"

"I don't think he remembers anything. For once it is fortunate that he is... wherever he is."

He removed several bottles from the refrigerator, including one containing orange juice. He poured a glass for her and then filled his own glass from one of the familiar green bottles.

Once, that would have repulsed her. She would not have been able to get the orange juice down. Now, it felt perfectly normal to be having breakfast at 4:30 in the afternoon with someone who drank human blood.

"LaCroix, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"

A raised eyebrow. "No... I suppose not."

"I've been wondering about something... When Divia brought you across, why weren't you poisoned, too? Why didn't you die?"

He ran his finger around the rim of his glass. "I've asked myself that. I don't know the answer. Perhaps it was because there was a mortal blood link between us as well as the vampire link.

"However, I think it is more likely that once she was brought across, she was in control of what she was. That we are physically superior to you is due in large part to the fact that we have an exaggerated ability to control our own bodies, and a heightened awareness of our internal make-up that extends almost down to the level of our very cells. It's not something most of us are actively conscious of until we are quite old, but Divia's master was an Ancient. It is entirely possible that she somehow attained the ability to use her poison selectively. In me, she saw a... companion," he said the word bitterly, "not a victim. She did not poison me simply because it was her choice not to do so."

"Was it... your choice to be brought across?"

"Choice? I did not want to _die_ , Dr. Lambert. That was my choice. There was no opportunity for me to fully understand the horror that Divia had become at the time."

She looked him in the eye. "And if you had understood?"

Ice blue eyes stared right back at her, "I still would have chosen not to die."

<He has no regrets> Natalie thought. She was going to let the subject drop, but he went on to tell her the amazing story of how he'd been faced with the prospect of becoming a vampire or being suffocated by poison gas and buried alive in the blistering ashes of Mt. Vesuvius. She was not sure that she herself would not have taken the same path.

But then he added, "Even had the circumstances of time and place been different, Dr. Lambert, my choice would still have been the same. To me, the price of my immortality was never too high to pay. Perhaps that is the legacy of evil that Divia left to me, but more likely, it is why she chose me."

<No regrets at all.>

There were other things she wondered about. "When you left Toronto... You left money for me. I don't understand why."

"When we left, Dr. Lambert, I had no idea if you would recover. I knew you would live, but what the ordeal had done to you physically, and emotionally... Let's just say I recognized that you mortals are frailer than we are. I had to ensure that you would have the best care, as Nicholas would have wanted. I would have continued to provide for that as long as it was necessary. However, since you fortunately recovered, well... call it compensation for your pain and suffering, inadequate though it is."

He was telling her to keep the money. Damned if she wouldn't, too.

He finished his glass and gathered up the extra bottles he had taken from the refrigerator.

"Amaru will need this," he said.

She picked up the cross and followed him, but he made her wait outside the bedroom until he told her it was alright to come in.

Amaru was in his bed. Vachon was lying on the floor, but when he saw her, he got to his feet, quickly, easily.

LaCroix watched him warily, but even though the younger vampire seemed tense and edgy, he made no threatening moves towards her.

"Everything has come back," he said.

Natalie set the cross down and touched his face. His skin was cool, the way it was supposed to be. She checked his hands, his arms, and then stood back and looked him over. The spastic paralysis that had made it so difficult for him to control his body was completely gone.

He should have been happy, but instead, he looked miserable.

"I have to go out tonight, Natalie. It's been too long. The urge is just too strong."

She tried to offer encouragement, "You can control it, Vachon. I know that you can..."

He looked downward, embarrassed. "I don't want to. Not tonight."

She lifted his face and looked at him. The healing process demanded blood, she knew that, and the trauma Vachon had suffered had been extensive. As a mortal, she could not comprehend what this Hunger did to Them, but it was plain he was suffering. This need physically hurt, and he'd had enough pain already.

"Vachon, it's okay." <I can accept what you are.>

Almost flippantly, Amaru added, "I will go along so he is not staked or burned in the sun like a stupid fledgling."

Vachon turned on him. "I don't need you!" he said angrily.

"I do not need you, either, _ayakonka_ , but I am still going."

Vachon didn't want to hear this. He grabbed some clothes and stormed out of the room.

"The healing is not yet complete," Amaru explained for her benefit. "You would not notice the weaknesses, but they are there. I can sense them, and so can he. He is just is too stubborn to admit it."

"It worked, though. Giving him your blood."

Amaru nodded. "Yes. He will be well soon... Do not hold your breath waiting for him to say 'thank you'."

Did she really want gratitude? She had given back to Vachon this dark gift that she herself would not have wanted, that Nick had never wanted, and because of that, at least one living, breathing, human being was probably going to die that night...

She cut that thought short.

She could do nothing about what They were, and she could no more have let Vachon die than she could have any other thinking creature. Whatever Vachon and the Inca would do that night, it was because they were vampires, and not because of anything Natalie Lambert could control.

Vachon was climbing the walls waiting for the sun to set. Natalie tried to get him to drink, but oddly, he wasn't interested. He was literally too agitated to sit still.

She prepared his medication for him, the way she usually did, but he refused it.

"I don't need it anymore."

"You can't know that, Vachon."

"I do know it." He touched his hand to his head. "There was a funny way that it felt in here, before. It's gone now. It's not going to happen again... I'm okay, Natalie. Really. Okay." He gave her a smile that could charm scales off a snake, but it abruptly faded when Amaru joined them.

"Let's go," he told Vachon.

Natalie wondered if either of them had noticed they were dressed almost exactly alike.

Vachon gave her one last look. He wasn't asking her permission to go, he just wanted reassurance that she wouldn't hate him for it later.

"Vachon, I don't like what you have to do, but that has nothing to do with how I feel about you. Go. Just don't tell me about it."

Another hint of a smile and they were gone.

Natalie took the few minutes she had alone to make notes in her journal, perhaps the last she would write on Vachon.

Nick joined her as she wrote. He said nothing, but his attention was on her, not in that other place he occupied. He was shaved and bathed and the last traces of blood from the night before had been washed out of his hair. He was so scrawny, but still, she found herself thinking he was the most beautiful creature she had ever seen.

It crossed her mind that what had happened that one night between her and Vachon might be possible for her and Nick, but she quickly pushed that thought from her mind. He was stronger than Vachon had been, for one thing. Even as frail as he was, he still had the strength of a mortal man. She'd seen that when he'd hurt himself. She didn't know if she could stop him if he was determined to drink from her, and if he hurt her again, she wondered if either of them would survive it.

She took his hands and examined the fingers to make sure the splints weren't impairing his circulation. It was hard to tell. His fingers were naturally pale and cold.

He didn't flinch or pull away from her touch, the way he had before. His eyes stayed with her a long time - Nick's eyes, not the vacant stare of the psychotic half-vampire thing he had become.

<He remembers!>

"Nick, Janette is coming. I think she can help you, make you well again." <Make you a vampire again.>

Did he understand?

For that matter, did she? She was going to give Nick back something he had always told her he didn't want. What if he preferred this oblivion to that hell? How could she even hope to know what she was about to do to him?

He took her hand in both of his, awkwardly because of the splints. He touched her fingers to his eyes and then to his mouth. At first she was puzzled, but then she made the connection.

"You will still be a vampire, Nick. There is nothing I can do that will change that." <And I can't, I _won't_ , leave you like this.>

No shock, no revulsion, no reaction of any kind. She looked at his eyes. He'd left her again.

"I love you Nick..." She touched his hair. "If it's gotta be a package deal, I can live with that now."


	26. Chapter 26

Janette arrived three days later, and she was just as Natalie had remembered her. Although the clothes she wore were simple, she managed to look regal and elegant in them, and she still carried herself with the same dignity and aristocratic bearing that Natalie had always found somewhat intimidating.

It was shortly after sundown, so it was Natalie who greeted her. LaCroix and Nick had not yet emerged from their sealed-off wing of the house, and Vachon and Amaru were off using the spa LaCroix had told her about to heat their bottles of blood by floating them in the hot water.

Neither of them liked drinking the blood cold, and LaCroix had refused to pay for delivery of another microwave after the two vampires had forgotten - twice - to return with one.

Luckily, Natalie had been able to warm canned soup with water she'd put through the coffee maker. She had discovered the gas stove in the kitchen was purely cosmetic and hadn't been fueled in 20 years.

"I'm glad you're here," Natalie told Janette sincerely. "I'm happy you agreed to come."

Janette sighed. "I never could deny Nicola, or LaCroix, for that matter."

"You aren't angry with Nick?"

"What Nicola did to me, he did out of love. I understood that after I got used to the idea that I was a vampire again. Besides, it has afforded me opportunities to see that Robert's son is provided for that I would not have had otherwise. He will not want for anything, ever. And if eternity is his choice, he will have that, too."

"You would bring Robert's son across?!"

"Only if he wants it and only when he is ready. But it is a chance for a part of Robert to go on forever. If I had stayed mortal, I would be dead, and the child would have nothing. There is no reason for me to be angry at Nicola... Where is he? I wish to see him."

"Janette, he isn't the way we knew him," Natalie warned her.

"LaCroix has told me. I have seen Nicola in many of his 'states' through our years together..."

"You haven't seen him like this. I just want you to be prepared."

"How bad is it?"

"He may not even know you."

Vachon and Amaru returned with their arms full of warm bottles and pulled up short when they saw the beautiful Janette. She immediately sensed they were vampires, and when Natalie introduced them, she seemed to sense something else as well.

She looked from one to the other and frowned. "Two of you, and yet you are the same... How is this possible? How were you made?"

They set the bottles down and Vachon stepped forward. "It is a long and dreary tale, milady, one with which I shall not bore you." He bowed and kissed her hand.

The Inca rolled his eyes and extended his own hand for a normal handshake.

Clearly, they sensed something strange in Janette, too. Vachon looked at her, puzzled. "You have _two_ masters?"

"Yes," Janette answered him, and obviously was not going to provide a further explanation, even though Vachon and Amaru clearly wanted one.

"Would you join us?" the Inca motioned towards the bottles on the table.

The two of them almost tripped over themselves and each other waiting on her.

They used LaCroix's crystal, not the everyday ceramic mugs. Both of them set a goblet in front of her at the same time, except Amaru did it just awkwardly enough to knock over the one Vachon had just put down.

It was deliberate and juvenile, and Natalie couldn't believe that after 500 years, men would still act that way.

Instead of making any move to clean up the mess, Vachon grabbed the Inca and threw him into the next room, which sent him tumbling into several pieces of furniture.

His dignity unforgivably compromised, Amaru came flying back - literally - and was about to return the favor when LaCroix appeared suddenly.

With one arm, the older, larger vampire pinned Amaru to the wall and in one lightning motion, he kicked Vachon's feet out from under him, knocking him flat on his face, and planted a foot on the back of his neck.

"Frolic... elsewhere..." he hissed.

Amaru nodded humbly and Vachon managed to choke out "Okay" before he let them go.

LaCroix then turned and greeted Janette.

She reached out her hands to take his, and then seemed surprised when he embraced her instead.

He stood back for a better look at her. "You look well."

"I am... Where is Nicola?"

LaCroix's voice was subdued. "He is still asleep. I will bring him to you soon. But first you must know not to expect too much in the way of a reunion."

"Natalie told me. What is it LaCroix? What happened to him?"

"I will leave the technical explanation to Dr. Lambert. Just suffice it to say that the condition Nicholas is in may be quite upsetting."

Janette nodded, now appearing apprehensive.

LaCroix excused himself and Natalie and Janette retired to the living room when it became obvious that Amaru and Vachon were not going to leave them to a private discussion.

Of course, Natalie imagined that the two of them could and would listen to every word of her conversation with Janette, anyway.

"He is different somehow," Janette spoke of LaCroix when she and Natalie were alone.

"How so?"

Janette shook her head. "I am not sure how to explain it. Something that was there before is gone... Something that I never liked."

"I admit, he is not what I expected. He has taken good care of Nick. I can almost believe that he loves him."

"I have always known that he does, but his idea of love has always included total obedience. Nick would not give him that, which made him want it even more. He was obsessed with it. Now... I sense that is unimportant to him. Something has changed."

"Maybe it is because Divia is dead. Perhaps as long as she existed, part of her evil lived through him."

"Are you now subscribing to the metaphysical, Dr. Lambert?" She lifted her goblet - the one that hadn't been spilled - and sipped from it.

"I don't know," Natalie said thoughtfully. "I just know that he isn't the S.O.B. Nick made me think he was."

Janette laughed at that, but then became serious. "What is wrong with Nicola?"

Natalie briefly explained the situation.

"What you are planning to do for him? How will I be of help in this?" she wanted to know.

Natalie explained the blood transfer procedure to Janette, along with her theory of why it would work. There would be no need to do a PCR on Janette. There simply was no one else. Either her blood would be effective, or it wouldn't.

"Those two," Janette indicated Vachon and Amaru, "you did this with them?"

"Yes. Vachon was very ill, in many ways worse than Nick. However, Amaru's blood was an almost perfect match for him, so there is really no way to predict if the results will be the same with you and Nick."

"How is it they are so alike?"

Natalie recounted what Vachon had told her about the way in which he and Amaru had been brought across.

"Twin vampires," Janette mused. "Interesting... They are not friends," she observed.

"I don't think they know what they are to each other."

Janette smiled. "Much like two other vampires we both know."

LaCroix entered the room with Nick behind him. Nick moved cautiously, careful of the sutures in his chest and abdomen, the way a surgical patient would be. Janette sensed his pain, and didn't embrace him.

Instead, she gently kissed him and stroked his cheek. "Mon Nicola..."

Natalie felt a pang or two of jealousy when Nick apparently recognized Janette immediately.

She spoke to him in French and for a brief moment, it almost looked like he was trying to answer her, but then his face went blank and he turned his attention instead to a silver and turquoise bracelet she wore. He didn't touch it, but he seemed fascinated by it, and it was plain that he <or Divia> wanted it.

"You've been shopping," Natalie nodded at the bracelet. It appeared authentic, and was of the type that was widely available in the area.

"When the opportunity is there, one must take it," she smiled. She slipped off the bracelet and gave it to Nick, and gently touched the splints on his forearms.

She gave Natalie a questioning look. "Broken bones?"

"He does not heal as he should," LaCroix explained.

"And he does not speak?" Janette asked.

"No," LaCroix said sadly. "His mind is... impaired. He is not able to communicate. I trust the good Doctor has explained her diagnosis to you?"

"Yes..." She put her fingers in Nick's hair, and he pulled away. "Tell me what it is that I must do."


	27. Chapter 27

Natalie would transfuse Janette's blood into Nick right before dawn. This would give Janette the opportunity to feed well, and time to assimilate the blood.

Also, Natalie planned to leave Nick's blood, with the last of Divia's cells, to greet the morning sun where they would be certain to be destroyed. She had already hauled the microwave outside and pushed it into a sunny, open pit on the craggy surface. None of the vampires had wanted to touch it or go near it, not even LaCroix.

As the preparations were made, it occurred to Natalie that this might not be as easy as it had been with Vachon. She had asked him, and he did not remember anything. His coma had protected him from any pain or fear the procedure might have entailed.

Nick might not be as cooperative. Already, he seemed to sense that something was being planned for him. He would not leave LaCroix, and the look on the older vampire's face was even more solemn than usual when she told him it was time.

"Come, Nicholas," LaCroix said softly. Nick trusted him, and followed him willingly. LaCroix looked like he was leading a lamb to the slaughter.

In a sense, he was. This would be the end of Divia, and Natalie could not help but wonder how he was feeling about that right then.

Nick took one look at the medical paraphernalia she had set up and bolted.

LaCroix restrained him, but ended up needing assistance from Vachon and Amaru to get him down and hold him there. Three vampires held him easily, but he was struggling so fiercely that to Natalie, it seemed that he was willing to rip his body apart rather than let them do what had to be done.

Then, she realized that this was not Nick. This was Divia, who did not care what torment she caused Nick's physical body. She was not going to leave it quietly.

Finally, Natalie managed to administer the curare that quickly paralyzed him. He was still conscious, though, and the expression in his blue eyes was one of abject terror.

Janette stroked his head and tried to comfort him, speaking softly to him in French as Natalie worked as quickly as possible to insert the tubes that would carry his blood - and Divia - out of his fragile body.

Tears streamed down Nick's face as she worked, and that made it hard for her. She was physically hurting him, she knew, but worse than that, he didn't understand why and she couldn't explain it to him.

As soon as the process was underway, she turned to Janette.

"Your turn."

LaCroix took Nick's head between his hands, and knelt beside him. "It will be over very soon, Nicholas," he said gently. "I will not leave you. Do not be afraid."

In minutes, both vampires were as Vachon and Amaru had been, completely drained and clinically dead.

Natalie took a deep breath and relaxed, thinking the worst was over.

But then Vachon muttered, "Oh, shit..." and started backing out of the room, his eyes fixed on the bags of blood on the floor.

Natalie glanced down and mentally echoed Vachon's statement.

Nick's blood was _moving_!

The bags were pulsating as if what was inside wanted out. After each contraction, the soft plastic stretched and the bags expanded like obscene balloons.

The evil was almost palpable. What would happen if the bags began to burst and what remained of Divia was freed?

Natalie envisioned classic scenes from old horror movies, Divia's errant cells running each of them down and overtaking them all.

It would have been funny to think about had she not seriously thought that was a real possibility.

She tried to think...

Why hadn't this happened with Vachon?

Frantically, her mind ran down a quick checklist while the three conscious vampires stared numbly at what appeared to be Divia's determined testimony that they would not, could not, prevail over her.

When one of the bags actually seemed to scoot a short distance across the floor, Natalie's gut reaction was to run, and get as far away from this thing as she could. To hell with Them and their demons!

But the scientist in her kept insisting that Divia was not invincible. _Something_ had curtailed this reaction when she had been forced from Vachon's body...

The Dilantin. It had to be.

It inhibited electrochemical activity, and it was the only significant difference between Vachon's blood and Nick's that she could think of...

She yelled at Vachon to bring it to her.

He stayed right where he was, staring at the pulsing mass that was still Divia. He wasn't refusing her request - he knew better than anyone else in that room what Divia was capable of - he was simply too frightened to move. The air in the room was electrified, giving them all the feeling that if anyone moved too suddenly, _something_ bad might happen. Vachon's fear had spread to Amaru as well.

"Where is it?!" LaCroix asked. Natalie told him, and he pushed past the two younger vampires and was back in an instant.

Natalie filled a syringe directly from the bottle and plunged it into the nearest plastic bag.

Abruptly, it stopped expanding. The pulsations slowed to stop.

Quickly, she injected the others.

"How do you like that, you little bitch?" she said when she finished injecting the last one.

Without wasting a moment, she gathered up Nick's blood. The transfusion would have to wait.

She ran outside with it and saw the first rays of daylight breaking on the horizon. She found the depression where she had thrown the microwave. Its bottom was sloped and its sides angled in such a way that it was in the direct sunlight for most of the day.

One by one, she tossed the bags into it. A couple of them burst on the sharp-edged rocks. The others would burst when the blood in them boiled in the coming daylight.

Natalie knew she must look and sound like a madwoman, but there was no one around to see or hear her when she yelled, "I beat you, you little whore! I've got him back, and you are nothing but ashes. Can you hear me? NOTHING BUT ASHES!"

Steam rose from the splattered blood as she ranted.

As her tirade wound down, Natalie could have sworn that something hissed at her.

\+ + + + + + +

Nick slept through the day and well into the night.

Natalie was prepared for both him and Janette to awaken ravenously hungry, and LaCroix had stood a vigil, prepared with provisions.

Janette was twice Amaru's age, so the hunger that had almost seized control of him after his blood had been drained did not seem to affect her at all.

Nick, on the other hand, awoke with a violent compulsion to feed on anything that moved. Janette had replenished herself adequately enough by that time that she was prepared to deal with him as Amaru had done with Vachon.

Natalie knew letting Janette tend to Nick until he was calmer was for the best, and although she couldn't keep herself from resenting it, she understood that Janette knew instinctively what to do for him, perhaps even better than Amaru had, since her relationship with Nick was intimate in ways quite different from the one the twin vampires shared.

Still the idea that they were together again... <Life's a bitch.>

Luckily, Nick was not overpowered by the desire for a kill like Vachon had been. He'd had so many centuries of experience controlling those urges that once he had been nourished a second time by Janette's blood, he was able to exert that control. His mind was sound again.

In the aftermath, Divia's Last Stand in the Bouncing Blood Bags seemed comical, but Natalie could not get that living blood out of her mind.

How much evil had that child absorbed in her young mortal life and her short existence as a free and deadly vampire? What would she have become if LaCroix had not sealed her in that tomb for 19 centuries?

Or, was this evil something that she was born with, something that only found added strength and purpose in the evil that surrounded her? How many others like her had there been, and what names did history know them by? Caligula? Vlad the Impaler? Hitler?

Her knee was hurting again. Marching over the godforsaken surface weighted down with that monstrous baggage had taken a toll on her physical being.

But she had defeated Divia. That gave her a feeling of power like none she had ever known. She could face anything now. The fact that Nick was a vampire seemed trivial by comparison. She loved him, and if she had to love the vampire, too, she now knew she could.

She popped a couple of Motrin and toasted her victory with a glass of grape juice.

\+ + + + + + +

It wasn't until the following evening that she was able to approach Nick. He was not recovering physically quite as quickly as Vachon had, probably because Janette had not been an exact match for him, but he already looked so much better. He was alert and aware of his surroundings. Natalie knew that the instant their eyes met.

Their first moments together were awkward. Natalie had no idea how much he remembered, or what his state of mind was at that moment, and she was disheartened by the fact that he didn't seem to have anything to say to her.

She decided it would be best to keep the visit strictly professional.

When she checked the sutures, she discovered that his body had not only healed the injuries, but had forced the stitches out as well. His wrists still seemed tender, though, so she left the splints in place.

He fingered the red indentation on his chest where he had driven in the stake. "This was a pretty stupid idea, I guess."

It was the first thing he'd said to her and she wanted to throw her arms around him and hold him and not let him go. But she tried to keep a stern look on her face and said, "Yes, it was. You're damn lucky your aim was off."

"No sympathy?"

"None whatsoever."

He fixed that puppy-dog stare of his on her, the one that generally made her forgive him anything. Those deep blue eyes that hid so much pain, yet could mirror such love and laughter back at her.

She felt her eyes fill with tears and she couldn't have stopped herself from embracing him if she had tried. "Oh God, Nick... I thought I'd lost you! I thought I'd never see you again."

He drew her into his arms, the way he used to, and it felt so good she cried even harder.

"It's okay, Nat. It's over now."

She pulled back, gently running her fingers across his face. "Is it, Nick?"

He took her hand and kissed her fingers. "I know what you're thinking. I'm still a vampire. Probably more of one now than I was before. But we can try again, Nat. We can try..."

"No," she cut him off, putting her fingers to his lips. "Not for me, Nick. Don't do it for me. I will help you like I did before if it's what _you_ want, but don't put yourself through that because of me. I love you. I love you _as you are_. I know that now."

"But LaCroix..."

"He loves you, too. You will never convince me otherwise, so don't even try to use him as an excuse."

He suddenly became the old, serious, self-reproaching Nick again. "Natalie, you don't know what you're saying. What happened before could happen again..."

"No, it won't. I believe that, and you have to, too."

He smiled at her. "Are you saying 'love conquers all'?"

She kissed him. "Maybe it does, Nick."


	28. Chapter 28

\---EPILOGUE---

Natalie had barely gotten through the door of her apartment when she was attacked by Sidney, who was howling for his breakfast. She filled his bowl to shut him up before she took off her coat and sorted through the day's mail. Amidst the bills and the junk mail was a small, sturdy cardboard box with no return address. She set that aside while she weeded through the rest of it.

It had been a long night, and she was tired, but even so, she had welcomed the routine of being back at her job. Dealing with dead bodies could be so much easier than dealing with live vampires, not that she had completely escaped the latter.

Thanks to some convincing, albeit bogus, medical documentation, Nick's bizarre disappearance had been directly attributed to the physical injuries he had sustained trying to protect Natalie from an unknown assailant. He had been reinstated on the force, although he was on a medical probation. Two serious head injuries in the span of one year had left his health open to question, to say nothing of his fitness for duty.

To avoid the risk of a delayed stress reaction triggered by working homicide cases, it had been recommended that he be temporarily assigned to vice. Rather than being upset by the implication that he was emotionally incapable of meeting the demands of a homicide detective, Nick seemed to be thriving in the more laid-back atmosphere, and was considering asking that the transfer be made permanent.

As for their personal relationship, they had yet to explore where that was going to go. She no longer hounded him about drinking blood, especially since, even though it was human blood he now preferred, many of his vampire characteristics seemed curiously suppressed. Natalie suspected it was partly because not denying himself somehow calmed his hunger, but she could not help but hope that because Janette's blood had not been a perfect match for him that maybe he had not entirely overcome all of what Divia had done to disable the vampire in him.

It was her ironic hope that he would never recover those instincts and the demands they had placed on him. She had observed that while he now preferred human blood, his appetite for it was sharply decreased. Although he occasionally would feed well, there were other times when he had to be reminded to eat. Consuming blood was still a matter of survival for him, but it was no longer the focus of his existence.

What if - just what if - this absence of bloodlust extended to her blood as well? What if now, he _could_ stop before he took too much?

Janette had already demonstrated that a mortal and a vampire could have a physical relationship. And Natalie knew from her experience with Vachon that it was possible for a male vampire to be satisfied sexually without killing his mortal partner. She knew, too, that she was now emotionally able to handle making love one of Them, although she hadn't been able to reveal that to Nick. She wasn't ready for him to know that she had been with Vachon, and she'd have to tell him before anything happened between them and he found it out from her blood.

She had vowed that if there was any way to find out for certain whether or not Nick's instincts were no longer strong enough to drive him to kill her, that his appetite was now such that he would be satisfied enough to stop before that point, she was determined to do it. It didn't matter anymore to her what Nick was. She loved him, not the man, not the vampire, but Nick Knight the Package Deal, and she wanted everything that went with that.

She continued to study the nature of Divia's blood and its ability to disable and kill vampires, with the hope that it might provide her some sort of clue that would enable her to give Nick the mortality he wanted, without the costs Divia had exacted. Grace had been right about the cells behaving in a manner resembling a fungus infection, and after a crash course in archeobiology, Natalie had discovered that Divia's cells shared many common traits with a fungus commonly found in ancient tombs. Had she somehow found a way to conscript these primative organisms and use them to her advantage, creating the new cells she needed to regenerate herself? It was frightening to think that evil that powerful could find its own way back from the dead. Was Divia really gone for good?

As for the other vampires in her life, only LaCroix had returned with them to Toronto. He said it was because there were many loose ends to be tied, and in part, that was true. There was the business of her abandoning the rental car in the middle of the desert, and the fact that the State of New Mexico wanted to be reimbursed for the needless search they had conducted. LaCroix took care of these things. He even managed to find new, and more lucrative, employment for the DMV clerk who had been fired for giving Vachon a driver's license. But she suspected his real reason for wanting to be there was the same as it had always been. He wanted to be near Nick.

And, the old demon had shown he was grateful for what she had done in the only way he knew how. The last time she had checked her bank balance, she was a millionaire.

Janette had returned to her new residence in Seattle, but Natalie didn't know where Vachon had gone. He had said he would be back, someday, but she imagined that Toronto just held too many painful memories, not only of Screed, Urs and Tracy, but of the hell that Divia had put him through, that would have to be dealt with first. She suspected that wherever Vachon was, the Inca was not far away, nor would he be until Vachon either found new friends, returned to his old ones, or rebuilt his "family."

The latter thought no longer horrified Natalie. So Vachon would make new vampires. Who was she to say that he had no right to do that?

Natalie opened the box. Inside, wrapped in bubble plastic, was a little blue dinosaur with yellow polkadots, the same one her little godchild had made for her before she had died such an early and terrible death, the one which had been hopelessly shattered the night the Enforcer had come for Vachon.

All 59 pieces had been meticulously returned to where they were supposed to be. The cracks had been filled in and sealed, and the acrylic paint had been matched perfectly.

It looked exactly as it had the day Cindy had given it to her.

With it was a neatly penned note that read:

_Thank you, Natalie, for putting the pieces back together. - With love, J.V._

THE END 


End file.
